Phonological Awareness across Child Populations: How Bilingualism and Dyslexia Interact

Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the development of an individual\u2019s language and literacy abilities. Phonological skills are indeed dramatically impaired in people with dyslexia, at any age and across languages, whereas their development in bilinguals is less clear. In addition, the interaction between bilingualism and dyslexia in this domain is still under-investigated. The aim of this paper is to provide new experimental evidence on this topic by exploring the phonological competence in Italian of monolingual and bilingual children with and without dyslexia. To this purpose, we developed three tasks, assessing nonword repetition, rhyme detection and spoonerisms, which we administered to 148 10-year- old children in two distinct studies. In Study 1, we found that two groups of L2 Italian typically developing bilinguals, having either Arabic or Romanian as L1, performed similarly to Italian monolinguals in all measures, pointing to absence of both bilingualism-related and L1-related effects in these tasks. In Study 2, we administered the same tasks to four groups of children: Italian monolinguals with dyslexia, Italian monolingual typically developing children, L2 Italian bilinguals with dyslexia and L2 Italian bilingual typically developing children. Results showed that children with dyslexia, both monolingual and bilingual, exhibited significantly more difficulties than typically developing children in all three tasks, whereas bilinguals, consistent with Study 1, performed similarly to their monolingual peers. In addition, no negative effects of bilingualism in dyslexia were found, indicating that being bilingual does not provide additional difficulties to children with dyslexia

Polysemy in word formation: the case of deverbal nominals

In questa tesi si analizza il significato lessicale delle nominalizzazioni deverbali tradizionalmente definite come nomi d'azione, vale a dire, quei nominali deverbali che conservano pressoch\ue9 inalterato il significato della base verbale e che sono morfologicamente derivati per mezzo di suffissi che fungono da operatori della nominalizzazione (detti anche trasposizionali). E' tuttavia risaputo che questi nominali presentano fenomeni di ambiguit\ue0 semantica: tra le diverse interpretazioni che essi possono esprimere, la distinzione fra lettura Evento (d'ora in avanti E) e lettura Risultato (R) \ue8 stata esplorata con particolare attenzione nella letteratura su questo tema, poich\ue9 essa rivela interessanti corollari morfo-sintattici. I nominali E conservano, infatti, non solo il significato del verbo, ma anche alcune propriet\ue0 verbali (in particolare, una struttura di argomenti sintattici) e rappresentano pertanto un caso di categoria mista Nome-Verbo, laddove i nominali R si comportano invece come nomi assoluti, non argomentali. Pertanto, insieme al significato eventivo o trasposizionale, si esplora il significato, o pi\uf9 precisamente, l'insieme delle interpretazioni espresse dai nominali R. Quest'ultima classe, in particolare, rappresenta l'oggetto privilegiato di indagine di questa dissertazione; poich\ue9 le interpretazioni dei nominali R sono state ampiamente trascurate nella letteratura sulla nominalizzazione, si sottolinea come tale designazione abbia acquisito un valore sintattico, anzich\ue9 semantico, e si dimostra che in questa classe vengono raggruppati elementi anche lontani dal punto di vista del contenuto semantico lessicale. La dicitura di nominale "Risultato", difatti, \ue8 stata indistintamente utilizzata per designare quei nominali che non mostrano una struttura argomentale e le altre propriet\ue0 caratterizzanti dei nominali E (si veda Grimshaw, 1990). Pertanto si propone di sostituire la designazione "Risultato" con quella di "Referenziale"; tuttavia, all'interno di questa classe eterogenea, si individua un nucleo di tratti semantici caratterizzanti e comuni ad un gruppo di nominali R, sui quali in particolare si concentra l'analisi teorica e la relativa modelizzazione formale. La ricerca affronta il problema dell'ambiguit\ue0 interpretativa delle parole complesse in una prospettiva di analisi morfologica. Per spiegare l'ambiguit\ue0 interpretativa E / R si ricorre ad una analisi semantica di tipo composizionale; vale a dire, si tenta di identificare il significato dei singoli elementi che compongono il derivato, la base verbale e l'affisso, e di derivare il significato del lessema complesso attraverso una composizione degli stessi. Pi\uf9 precisamente, si propone una duplice rappresentazione della semantica lessicale degli affissi che sono le teste di queste forme morfologicamente complesse. Pertanto l'ambiguit\ue0 lessicale \uab E / R \ubb viene spiegata ad un livello di rappresentazione lessicale, mentre la disambiguazione del senso avviene chiaramente ad un livello pi\uf9 alto di composizione sintattico-semantica...In this research, I survey a significant pattern of deverbal word-formation in Italian, and integrate the data analysis into a recently developed theoretical model of derivational semantics. In particular, the main goal of this study is to analyze the range of semantic interpretations and the corresponding morpho-syntactic behavior displayed by the class of deverbal nouns usually acknowledged as "action nominals". While Chapter 2 contains an overview of the relevant literature on the subject in the generative tradition, the body of the dissertation is composed of Chapters 3 to 5, where I work out a theoretical proposal aimed at accounting for the lexical meaning of a range of deverbal nominals in a framework of decompositional lexical semantics. Specifically, this research, which is placed against the theoretical background of generative morphology, rests on groundwork laid in recent years by Lieber and Baayen (1997; 1999) and Lieber (2003), and in the more elaborated version of Lieber (2004). The present chapter introduces the reader to the phenomenon of nominalization, offers an overview of the subject to be discussed and of the theoretical background, and finally sketches out the thesis outline

Recommendations for multilingualism and developmental communicative disorders

This report investigates two topics that are gaining growing interest in bilingual research, concerning on the one side the identification of language and reading disorders in bilingual children and, on the other side, the interaction between bilingualism and these disorders in children who have been officially diagnosed as communicatively impaired. Our research suggests that bilingualism, far from being a disadvantage, can offer linguistic and cognitive benefits that extend also to impaired children. We build on these results to indicate some best practices and recommendations for parents, educators and health professionals that deal with children suffering from specific communicative impairments

The effectiveness of reading intervention in adults with developmental dyslexia: A systematic review

Developmental Dyslexia is a lifelong condition characterized by reading and spelling deficits that persist into adulthood, negatively affecting the individual’s academic and professional careers. Although numerous studies have been conducted to assess the effectiveness of reading interventions in children, providing promising results, research on adults is still sparse. The aim of this paper was that of summarizing and extending the current knowledge about the effectiveness of reading intervention programs proposed to adults with dyslexia, providing a systematic review of the available research. The literature search comprised an electronic search in the databases ERIC, PsycINFO, Scopus and ProQuest, and an examination of the references of previous studies. Eight studies met the inclusion criteria and were analyzed in detail, discussing the participants’ profile, the main features of the proposed interventions and their effectiveness on different reading components, also including reading comprehension, spelling and phonological abilities. Results indicate that providing a literacy training can produce significant gains also in adults with dyslexia and that further research in this domain is needed, especially in languages with different orthographic and writing systems, to guarantee to struggling readers a concrete opportunity to enhance their reading skills and enjoy a better quality of life

Extended-release ranolazine: critical evaluation of its use in stable angina

Coronary heart disease is the major cause of morbidity and mortality throughout the world, and is responsible for approximately one of every six deaths in the US. Angina pectoris is a clinical syndrome characterized by discomfort, typically in the chest, neck, chin, or left arm, induced by physical exertion, emotional stress, or cold, and relieved by rest or nitroglycerin. The main goals of treatment of stable angina pectoris are to improve quality of life by reducing the severity and/or frequency of symptoms, to increase functional capacity, and to improve prognosis. Ranolazine is a recently developed antianginal with unique methods of action. In this paper, we review the pharmacology of ranolazine, clinical trials supporting its approval for clinical use, and studies of its quality of life benefits. We conclude that ranolazine has been shown to be a reasonable and safe option for patients who have refractory ischemic symptoms despite the use of standard medications (for example, nitrates, beta-adrenergic receptor antagonists, and calcium channel antagonists) for treatment of anginal symptoms, and also provides a modestly improved quality of life

Event delimitation in Mandarin: The case of diminishing reduplication

Mandarin verbal reduplication is generally regarded as a phenomenon conveying an aspectual value since it temporally bounds the event expressed by the base verb, thus resulting in a (counter-iconic) ‘diminishing’ semantics. In this paper, we put forward a novel syntactic account of diminishing reduplication in Mandarin, which derives the aspectual semantic properties of these constructs from the syntax of their event structure. In particular, we outline an analysis of reduplication as the spell out of two copies of the same lexical item, whereby the reduplicant is the lower copy sitting as the complement of the verbal head (higher copy), and displaying the distributional and interpretive properties of ‘weak’ verbal classifiers. Focusing on the status of the reduplicant, we present distributional, interpretive and diachronic evidence in support of our analysis

Report on design of new teaching methods and remediation tools for dyslexia

The aim of this work is to provide a review of the remediation therapies that can be used in the rehabilitation of developmental dyslexia; a special emphasis is put on morphological instruction as a promising strategy for compensating the phonological deficits exhibited by dyslexic children, both monolinguals and bilinguals, and enhancing their literacy skills. We will begin our discussion by presenting an overview of developmental dyslexia, discussing its manifestations and its relationships with other developmental disorders, and in particular with Specific Language Impairment. We will then present the results of the studies that we carried out within the European Project AThEME, which confirm the presence of a morphological deficit in dyslexic children, but also point to an advantage in morphological tasks of bilingual children, both dyslexics and typically developing, over their monolingual peers. On the basis of these results, we propose that morphological training could be a viable and effective strategy for the treatment of reading difficulties in both monolingual and bilingual children. We will back this proposal up by presenting the results of three meta- analyses, for a total of 46 studies reviewed, confirming that morphological treatment can lead to enhancements in reading, spelling and literacy-related skills, including phonological and morphological competence, vocabulary development and reading comprehension

Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters

The aim of this work is to investigate how bilingual children perform with respect to monolingual children in a task eliciting direct object clitic pronouns in Italian. Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) (Bortolini et al. 2006). Moreover, this task is reported to be particularly challenging for early second language children (EL2), who are less accurate than their peers in this task (Vender et al. 2016). Even though the typology of errors committed by the two populations (non-impaired bilinguals and SLI children) is generally different, it can be difficult to keep them apart from each other and, as a consequence, to identify a language impairment in bilingual children. However, it has been suggested that the difficulties exhibited by EL2 children in clitic production are related to their competence in their L2 and that they should disappear as soon as their mastery of the L2 increases. To test this prediction, we assessed clitic production in a group of 31 bilingual children having Italian as their L2 (mean age 10;2), comparing their performance to that of a group of 33 Italian monolingual children (mean age 10;2). The bilingual children used their L1 on a daily basis, as assessed by means of a bilingual exposure questionnaire, and had on average eight years of exposure to Italian; moreover, they performed similarly to monolinguals in a receptive vocabulary task, indicating that their competence in Italian was good. Consistently with our predictions, we found that bilingual children performed very accurately in the clitic elicitation task, similarly to monolinguals, confirming that the deficits previously found in EL2 children were not related to bilingualism itself, but more likely to their still incomplete competence in Italian

Verbal reduplication in Sinitic

The main aim of this paper is to underpin the connection between the semantic relationship binding the constituents of verbs and the formal and semantic properties of their reduplication in Sinitic. We first discuss in detail verbal and adjectival reduplication in Standard Mandarin, the best described Chinese language; we also collected data on adjectives, in order to compare them to verbs. Then, we analyze data from a convenience sample of twelve Chinese \u2018dialects\u2019, representing the eight major groups of Sinitic, comparing them to Mandarin. We show that whereas the ABAB reduplication pattern often has a (counter-iconic) diminishing meaning and appears as close(r) to syntax, being also sensitive to the aspectual properties of the base, the AABB pattern always has an increasing function, regardless of the word class of the base, and it is a phenomenon conditioned by morphological factors, being sensitive to the relation holding between the constituents of the base verb