Stress assignment in the development of reading aloud: Nonword priming effects on Italian children.

Two experiments investigated the development of two aspects related to stress assignment in reading. First, we tested whether the role of distributional knowledge concerning stress changes with the development of the reading system; second, we tested whether stress information is computed independently of phonemic information since the first stages of reading acquisition. We ran two identical experiments in Italian, one with children of two age levels (second and fourth grades) and one with adults. Results showed that older children behave similarly to adults, but younger children do not. Differently from the advanced readers, younger children use more general distributional knowledge about stress and are not able to compute stress information apart from phonemes. Taken together, our results suggest that the stress subsystem, and in particular the mechanisms working at the level of the phonological buffer are not fully developed during the first stages of reading

Temporal and causal reasoning in deaf and hearing novice readers

Temporal and causal information in text are crucial in helping the reader form a coherent representation of a narrative. Deaf novice readers are generally poor at processing linguistic markers of causal/temporal information (i.e., connectives), but what is unclear is whether this is indicative of a more general deficit in reasoning about temporal/causal information. In Study 1, 10 deaf and 63 hearing children, matched for comprehension ability and age, were compared on a range of tasks tapping temporal/causal reasoning skills. In Study 2, 20 deaf and 32 hearing children, matched for age but not reading comprehension ability, were compared on revised versions of the tasks. The pattern of performance of the deaf was different from that of the hearing; they had difficulties when temporal and causal reasoning was text-based, but not when it was nonverbal, indicating that their global temporal/causal reasoning skills are comparable with those of their hearing counterparts

Retrieving Learning Resources over the Cloud

Reusing resources has been on the rise recently in the ICT sector. In fact, this trend is expanding into other areas such as the educational sector. Learning objects have made it possible to create digital resources that can be reused in various didactic units. These resources are stored in repositories, and thus require a search process that allows them to be located and retrieved. The present study proposes the AIREH tool, which was deployed into a cloud environment and facilitates the retrieval of learning objects by integrating virtual organizations and agents with CBR systems that implement collaborative filtering techniques. Workshop on Learning Technology for Education in Cloud (LTEC'12) Workshop on Learning Technology for Education in Cloud (LTEC'12) Look Inside MyCopy Softcover Edition 24.99 EUR/USD/GBP/CHFEuropean Commision (EC). Funding FP7/SP1/ICT. Project Code: 25741

Contribution sociolinguistique à la perception phonétique des sons du français par des italophones

TOULOUSE2-BUC Mirail (315552102) / SudocSudocFranceF

Stress priming and statistical learning in Italian nonword reading: evidence from children

Italian has regular spelling-sound correspondences; however, assign- ment of lexical stress is unpredictable. Sensitivity to stress neighborhood infor- mation was investigated by constructing three types of three-syllabic nonwords: nonwords with word-endings characterized by a strong neighborhood of dominant stress words (dominant), nonwords with word-endings characterized by a strong neighborhood of non-dominant stress words (non-dominant), and nonwords with word-endings characterized by weak and/or inconsistent stress neighborhoods (ambivalent). Examples of these three types of nonwords were used as targets in a priming experiment. Examples of two of these types of nonwords (dominant and non-dominant) were used as primes. Adults (Experiment 1) and second and fourth- grade children (Experiment 2) were tested in a reading aloud task, and percentage of responses with dominant stress was measured. Children were sensitive to item- specific stress neighborhood information, but less so than adults. Children demon- strated more marked effects of dominant stress, effects that appear to decrease with age. Children also showed smaller effects of prosodic priming compared to adults. The results are in line with a statistical approach to learning

Quando, prima, perch\ue9: inferenze temporali e causali nei processi di comprensione del testo scritto

I disturbi di comprensione del testo scritto riguardano spesso carenze nell'impiego strategico ed efficiente di alcuni processi linguistico‐cognitivi, come il ragionamento verbale e i processi inferenziali. Si spiegano nel processo dinamico di interazione tra le informazioni nuove fornite dal testo e le conoscenze presenti nella mente del lettore e si manifestano nelle difficoltà di individuazione e di ricostruzione di relazioni logiche all’interno del testo (Cain, 2010, Cain & Nash, 2011). La presente ricerca mira a studiare l'elaborazione di relazioni logiche attraverso due test in cui sono stati utilizzati quattro connettori temporali (prima, dopo, mentre e quando) e tre connettori causali (perché, poiché e così) in due contesti diversi. Il primo test era composto da 21 item, ciascuno composto da un'immagine e tre frasi. L'immagine rappresentava una situazione che il soggetto doveva osservare, prima di scegliere l'enunciato più adatto a descriverla. Il secondo test era un racconto unico di 667 parole, presentato sotto forma di 14 paragrafi. I ventiquattro connettori della storia erano presentati ognuno con due altri non congruenti. I soggetti dovevano identificare il connettore che dava senso al testo. Centocinquantuno bambini tra i 7 e gli 11 anni (dalla terza classe della scuola primaria alla seconda media inferiore) sono hanno partecipato alla ricerca, rispondendo ai due test e alle prove MT di comprensione del testo (Cornoldi & Colpo, 1995, 1998). I dati raccolti sono stati analizzati attraverso una analisi della varianza a misure ripetute, con due fattori tra i soggetti: il fattore "classe", a 5 livelli, e il fattore "livello di comprensione del testo", a 4 livelli in base ai punteggi ottenuti nelle prove MT, e con due fattori entro i soggetti: il tipo di test (a 2 livelli: scelta dell'enunciato in base all'immagine, inserimento del connettore in un testo) e il tipo di connettore (a 7 livelli, uno per ciascun connettore). Come variabile dipendente è stata usata l'accuratezza, ovvero la percentuale di risposte corrette. I risultati mostrano la presenza di un non sorprendente effetto principale sia del fattore "classe" che del fattore "livello di comprensione del testo", in quanto l'accuratezza migliora passando dalla terza primaria alla seconda media, e nei quattro livelli, dal più basso al più elevato. Risulta significativo anche l'effetto legato al tipo di connettore, dal momento che vi sono connettori più semplici da elaborare di altri, e l'effetto del tipo di test, in quanto vi è una maggiore accuratezza nelle risposte date in un contesto non-verbale (test1) rispetto al contesto verbale (test 2). Risulta interessante anche un'interazione significativa tra tipo di test e tipo di connettore: il test che utilizza il testo narrativo presenta una maggiore difficoltà nell'elaborazione delle inferenze temporali “prima” e “dopo” e di quelle causali “perché” e “perciò”, che non emerge nel test con l'immagine. I risultati ottenuti saranno discussi alla luce dei processi cognitivi coinvolti nella comprensione, come la memoria di lavoro, la memoria a lungo termine, l'immaginazione o l'attenzione e dei modelli interpretativi della comprensione del testo. Implicazioni pratiche per la valutazione di uno strumento per l'elaborazione delle relazioni logiche saranno discusse

Detection of pitch violations depends upon the familiarity of intonational contour of sentences.

Introduction. Former studies have shown that a pitch change in utterances in speech was detected accurately in both native (French) and unfamiliar (Portuguese) language and produced an early negativity and a late positivity in the ERPs, more clearly marked in the native language (Schön et al. 2004; Marques et al., 2007). The present study used the same design to further investigate the influence of the familiarity of the language context on pitch perception. The aim was to examine the effects of pitch change in the native (Italian) and foreign (French) languages, and in meaningless sentences preserving the intonational contour of the mother tongue (jabberwocky). Method. Weak and strong pitch changes incongruous with the preceding context were compared to a control congruous condition. Participants had to decide as fast and as accurately as possible if they perceived a pitch change. Both behavioral (accuracy and RTs) and ERP measures were analyzed. Results. Results showed optimal accuracy and faster RTs in Italian, followed by jabberwocky, and then French. The same trend was present in ERP data, with an early negativity over temporal sites and a late positivity over parietal sites. These effects developed earlier and were more pronounced for the strong incongruity in Italian and in jabberwocky than in French. Conclusions. The similarity of results for Italian (congruous) and jabberwocky sentences on one hand, and the difference of results for French sentences, on the other hand, show that familiarity with intonational contour of utterances/speech provided essential cues to perform the task