Supporting bilingualism in vulnerable populations

Although bilingualism is generally appraised and supported by society, many more doubts arise when it comes to children suffering from neurodevelopmental disorders. The concern that the exposure to two languages might deteriorate the linguistic development of children, together with the advice to simplify the linguistic environment and to adopt a monolingual approach, leads many families to abandon their home language and sacrifice bilingualism. Scientific research, however, has shown that this fear is ungrounded and that children with developmental disorders can become successful bilingual speakers, if they are provided with appropriate linguistic exposure. The aim of this paper is that of providing a state-of-the-art of the literature on this topic, by reviewing studies conducted on the interaction between bilingualism and neurodevelopmental disorders, focusing in particular on the interaction between bilingualism and developmental language disorder (DLD), developmental dyslexia and autism spectrum disorder. We discuss issues related to the early identification of DLD and dyslexia among bilinguals and we report the results of studies showing that bilingualism does not exacerbate the difficulties of children with developmental disorders, but on the contrary it can be beneficial for them, at the cognitive, linguistic and socio-cultural level. Finally, we provide some recommendations for parents, educators and practitioners, focusing on the importance of supporting the family language in all of its components, including literacy, for a complete and harmonic bilingual growth

Editorial: New Educational Technologies and Their Impact on Students' Well-Being and Inclusion Process

none5noopenVernice, Mirta; Carretti, Barbara; Sarti, Daniela; Traficante, Daniela; Lorusso, Maria LuisaVernice, Mirta; Carretti, Barbara; Sarti, Daniela; Traficante, Daniela; Lorusso, Maria Luis

Comparison on Well-Being, Engagement and Perceived School Climate in Secondary School Students with Learning Difficulties and Specific Learning Disorders: An Exploratory Study

none6noopenLombardi, Elisabetta; Traficante, Daniela; Bettoni, Roberta; Offredi, Ilaria; Vernice, Mirta; Sarti, DanielaLombardi, Elisabetta; Traficante, Daniela; Bettoni, Roberta; Offredi, Ilaria; Vernice, Mirta; Sarti, Daniel

how subjectivity can be investigated in the post rationalist cognitive approach clinical and psycho diagnostic tools

Reciprocity with primary care-givers affects subjects' adaptive abilities towards the construction of the most useful Personal Meaning Organization (PMO) with respect to their developmental environment. Over the last ten years we analyzed the post-rationalist approach focusing on the construction of a specific framework for distinguishing immediate experience from explanations of the experience, the slow-motion ("moviola") technique, and the analysis of awareness and resistance. Neuroimaging (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fMRI), genetic polymorphism investigations and new psychodiagnostic post-rationalist tests (Mini Questionnaire of Personal Organization, MQPO, and Post-Rationalist Projective Reactive, PRPR) were used to conduct a scientific in vivo study of PMO. The presence of specific and stable clinical patterns both in inward and outward subjects was supported by parallel differences in cerebral activation during emotional tasks at fMRI and in the different expression of some polymorphisms concerning serotonin pathways; Furthermore, validation data concerning both a questionnaire (as MQPO) and, crucially, a projective test (as PRPR) allowed to distinguish four organizational profiles, confirming their adaptive significance in assimilation of experience. Focusing on the PMO promotes the emergence of adaptive individual resources, thereby improving skills needed to control perturbing emotions and to apply more flexible behaviour strategies

Cross-linguistic patterns in the acquisition of quantifiers.

Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words as well as the cognitive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here, we consider the extent to which systems and practices that support number word acquisition can be applied to quantifier acquisition and conclude that the two domains are largely distinct in this respect. Consequently, we hypothesize that the acquisition of quantifiers is constrained by a set of factors related to each quantifier's specific meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for "all," "none," "some," "some…not," and "most" in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-y-old children and 536 adults. We found a cross-linguistically similar order of acquisition of quantifiers, explicable in terms of four factors relating to their meaning and use. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that language- and learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the National Academy of Sciences via http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.160134111

The acquisition of SV order in unaccusatives: manipulating the definiteness of the NP argument

In two sentence repetition experiments, we investigated whether four- and five-year-olds master distinct representations for intransitive verb classes by testing two syntactic analyses of unaccusatives (Burzio, 1986; Belletti, 1988). Under the assumption that, with unaccusatives, the partitive case of the postverbal argument is realized only on indefinites (Belletti, 1988), we tested whether children used indefiniteness as a feature to assign the partitive case to the verb's argument. In the sentences, we manipulated whether the subject preceded or followed the (unaccusative or unergative) verb and whether the subject was expressed by means of a definite or indefinite NP. With unaccusatives, children tended to place the subject in the postverbal position when the subject NP was indefinite, whereas, when the sentence presented a definite postverbal subject, children preferred to place the definite subject in the preverbal position. Definiteness exerted an effect only with unaccusatives, suggesting that children treated unergatives and unaccusatives differently

Promoting bilingualism in children with neurodevelopmental disorders: State of the art and research avenues

The aim of this article is to dispel, moving from a solid scientific basis, the false myth that bilingualism can exacerbate a vulnerable condition due to the presence of a neurodevelopmental disorder. We will present the results of the most recent studies that have explored the interaction between bilingualism and neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., language disorder, developmental dyslexia, and autism spectrum disorder), addressing the issue of early identification of such disorders in bilinguals. Results indicate that bilingualism does not worsen the difficulties of children with neurodevelopmental disorders, on the contrary it can be beneficial to their cognitive and social development. Starting from the observation that the advantages of bilingualism are found regardless of the nature and prestige of the languages taken into consideration, the importance of maintaining the family language will be emphasized, especially in relation to families with Italian as a second language and with a migrant backgroun

Is Morphological Awareness a Relevant Predictor of Reading Fluency and Comprehension? New Evidence From Italian Monolingual and Arabic-Italian Bilingual Children

In this study, we examined the contribution of morphological awareness to reading competence in a group of Italian L1 and Arabic-Italian early L2 children, i.e., exposed to Italian before 3-years of age. Children from first to fifth grade (age range: 6\u201311-years old) were tested on a range of morphological awareness and lexical tasks. Reading ability was tested through standardized tests of reading fluency and comprehension. Results showed that L1 children outperformed L2 on every measure of morphological awareness, as well as on reading tests. Regression analyses revealed that morphological awareness contributed to a different extent to reading ability across groups. Accuracy in the morphological awareness tasks was a significant predictor of word (and non-word) reading fluency in L1 and L2 first and second graders, while only in L1 third to fifth graders, response times and accuracy to a morphological awareness task explained a unique amount of variance in reading comprehension. Our results highlight the critical role of morphological processing in reading efficiency and suggest that a training inspired by morphological awareness may improve reading skills also in bilingual students

Mapping thematic roles onto grammatical functions in sentence production: evidence from structural priming in Italian

Four experiments in Italian investigated how conceptual entities are mapped onto grammatical functions. By orthogonally manipulating the animacy of the elements partaking to a transitive event, we tested two views of the theme to function mapping process. Under the function mapping account, this mapping is a competition for the syntactic functions between concepts associated to different thematic roles (e.g., agent, patient), with animate entities and agents most likely to be mapped onto subject function (Bock and Levelt in handbook of psycholinguistics, Academic Press, San Diego, pp 945–984, 1994). The argument selection principle assumes that thematic roles can be decomposed into more primitive features, namely Proto-Roles (Dowty in language 67(3):547–619, 1991). Given a transitive event, the concept that possesses the largest number of semantic features prototypically associated with the agent is realized as the subject; the concept involving more patient-like entailments is realized as object. In Experiment 1, participants rated the Proto-Roles properties of the concepts partaking to transitive events. Experiment 2 involved a picture naming task of the same transitive events. Structural priming was used in Experiments 3 and 4 to influence the overall distribution of active and passive responses. In this way, the two views could be contrasted under different levels of bias towards the active. The results support the argument selection view under which theme to function mapping is influenced not only by the conceptual accessibility of the concepts but also by the mismatch between the semantic features of the argument (its animacy) and the thematic representation of the event. The data further generalize the evidence for structural priming to Italian