Friendship and romantic relationships during early and middle childhood

Ideas about romantic relationships have been studied in adolescents. This article extends this study to younger children. We asked two hundred seventy 5- to 11-year-olds to draw “two children who have a romance” and “two children who are friends,” and we subsequently interviewed each participant about the characters’ relationships. The drawings were coded with three scales of Pictorial Assessment of Interpersonal Relationships (PAIR), an instrument by Bombi, Pinto, and Cannoni. Interviews were categorized by the characters’ age and identity and by the distinguishing features of romance and friendship: location, intimacy, activity, personal characteristics, and emotions. Scale scores were compared with variance analyses, whereas the categories frequencies were submitted to chi-square. Results showed that all participants were able to distinguish the two relationships, even if the descriptions increased in detail with age. Girls provided more information than boys about romance, but were less inclined to talk about their own romantic experience

Un nuovo anglicismo sintattico?

Analisi di una struttura sintattica che va incontro ad un incremento diffusione nell'italiano contemporaneo (zero +sostantivo) che si inserisce tra 'nuovi' moduli negativi. L'influsso alloglotto ha certamente avuto un ruolo nel potenziamento di questa struttura

Intervista a Michele Mirabella

Lingua speciale medicina, comunicazione, giovan

How does a bicycle work? A new instrument to assess mechanical reasoning in school aged children

This study demonstrated that a brief interview can reveal the mechanical reasoning that could not be assessed via the Bicycle Drawing Test. This study, conducted on 190 children (6 to 11 years old), shows that mechanical reasoning improves with age. It shows correlations with spatial reasoning and motor control, and with visual reasonin