Margherita Orsolini

Sapienza University of Rome | la sapienza · Department of Developmental and Social Psychology

For decades, researchers have suggested the existence of a bilingual cognitive advantage, especially in tasks involving executive functions such as inhibition, shifting, and updating. Recently, an increasing number of studies have questioned whether bilingualism results in a change in executive functions, highlighting conflicting data published in...

For decades, researchers have suggested the existence of a bilingual cognitive advantage, especially in tasks involving executive functions such as inhibition, shifting, and updating. Recently, an increasing number of studies have questioned whether bilingualism results in change in executive functions, highlighting conflicting data published in th...

We explore the transdiagnostic approach (TA), focusing on its innovative suggestions for research on the intervention’s effects and the clinical practice of selecting priorities for intervention. We argue that TA involves a systemic perspective by investigating the relationships between different developmental dimensions and focusing on stimulating...

The evidence overviewed in such a chapter suggests that intervention focused on early caregiver-child communication and, starting from preschool children, training focused on both general learning mechanisms and metacognitive skills, can produce promising effects. Such training should alternate with an intervention focused on more specific skills,...

This study explored how working memory resources contributed to reading comprehension using tasks that focused on maintenance of verbal information in the phonological store, the interaction between the central executive and the phonological store (WMI), and the storage of bound semantic content in the episodic buffer (immediate narrative memory)....

Understanding Intellectual Disability: A Guide for Professionals and Parents supports professionals and parents in understanding critical concepts, correct assessment procedures, delicate and science-infused communication practices and treatment methods concerning children with intellectual disabilities. From a professional perspective, this book r...

The different psychological, neuropsychological and educational implications of the child migration are reported in this chapter. In the first section the psychological consequences of migration and the loss of the original country traditions and environment are discussed; in the second section the topic of influence of poverty on cognitive develop...

"Assistente personaggi" propone una serie di esercizi-gioco che i bambini di scuola primaria con bisogni educativi speciali possono praticare a casa, dopo una prima familiarizzazione in un laboratorio a scuola. Ciascun serious game, partendo da un videoclip tratto da un film di animazione, presenta una sequenza di attività che stimolano la comprens...

Aging seems to be associated with impairment of attentional network functioning. It is not known whether social information can modulate this age-related decline. We used three variants of Attention Network test to examine the age-related decline of attentional effects in response to stimuli with and without social-cognitive content. Three groups o...

Il bambino D. ci ha spiegato che quando riesce a fare "da solo" a scuola, senza chiedere ogni secondo l'aiuto dell'insegnante, allora sì che si sente intelligente. Quando non riesco non mi ci sento. Le sue parole ci hanno fatto comprendere chiaramente, più di qualsiasi manuale, che per stare bene a scuola e per sentirsi capaci di pensare, dobbiamo...

Ecco in sintesi le principali finalità del libro "Pensando si impara"

In this study we explored metaphor and idiom competencies in two clinical populations, children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and children with Klinefelter syndrome (KS), (age range: 9–12), compared to typically developing (TD) children of the same age. These three groups were tested with two multiple-choice tests assessing idiom comprehens...

Klinefelter syndrome (KS) is a genetic anomaly involving the presence of one or more supernumerary X chromosomes in male individuals. In the cognitive profile of these individuals, strengths are found in nonverbal abilities, whereas weaknesses are observed in executive function, language, and academic performance. Our study is based on a comparison...

Literature on children with Klinefelter Syndrome (KS) points to general linguistic difficulties in both comprehension and production among other cognitive functions, and in the majority of cases, these coexist with an intellectual level within the norms. In these conditions, children having language delay generally engage in language therapy and ar...

In this multiple case study we analyzed oral text comprehension, reading profiles and underlying cognitive abilities (attention, executive functions, working memory, narrative memory, rapid automatized naming and vocabulary) of 9 children identified as poor written text comprehenders after a school screening on 75 third grade children. Four out of...

Abstract This multiple case study explores the effects of a cognitive training program in children with mild to borderline intellectual disability. Experimental training effects were evaluated comparing pre-/post-test changes of (a) a baseline phase versus a training phase in the same participant, (b) an experimental training versus either a no in...

Quali meccanismi cognitivi e linguistici differenziano bambini che hanno una comprensione bassa o deficitaria solo nel testo scritto (CTS) da bambini che hanno difficoltà di comprensione sia del testo scritto sia del testo orale (CTS-CO)? Abbiamo esplorato questa domanda analizzando i profili cognitivi di 10 bambini di terza classe primaria che, in...

Until the first decade of the current millennium, the literature on metaphor comprehension highlighted typical difficulties in children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). More recently, some scholars have devised special programs for enhancing the capability of understanding metaphors in these children. This article presents a ca...

In questo studio presentiamo il caso di G, un bambino di 11 anni e 10 mesi valutato al Servizio di Consulenza sui disturbi dell’apprendimento presso il dipartimento di Psicologia dei Processi di Sviluppo e Socializzazione, Sapienza Università di Roma. I genitori si rivolgono al servizio per via di una discrepanza fra i risultati delle varie valutaz...

Intellectual disability is a frequent but still ill-defined condition. This encompasses individuals with heterogeneous cognitive profiles who are included in a same diagnostic category, on the basis of (1) an IQ score below approximately 70 and (2) a clinical assessment of deficits in adaptive functioning. In the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manu...

The present case study investigates the effects of a cognitive training of verbal working memory that was proposed for Davide, a 14-year-old boy diagnosed with mild intellectual disability. The program stimulated attention, inhibition, switching, and the ability to engage either in verbal dual tasks or in producing inferences after the content of a...

Fatigante et al. present a case study of the interactions between a target adolescent, Davide, with a diagnosis of mild intellectual disability, and adult therapists in assessment and therapeutic contexts. The study assumes a Deweyan approach to reflective thinking and analyses how the child’s reasoning abilities display in conversation. Their anal...

We ask whether stimulating executive functions (i.e. inhibition and switching) and the ability to engage in verbal dual tasks, can produce “near transfer” effects to performance with verbal working memory tasks, in children with intellectual disability (ID) or borderline intellectual functioning (BIF). Four participants with ID (IQ range: 45-66; me...

This study examines the interplay between repair practices and emotional responsiveness and availability in interactions of 12 mothers with their 4- and 5-year-old children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Conversational sequences characterized by linguistic and communicative mother-child misunderstanding were identified and described throu...

Assessment and treatment of D.: intellectual or learning disability? The first part of this study is an overview of the controversial evidences supporting the interpretation of IQ in terms of unitary intellective function. Taking into account evidences of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and biology I argue that impaired learning underlying a...

In this study we used a semantic battery assessing the conceptual, lexical, and metacognitive level in semantic relationships to predict expressive lexicon in preschool children with typical and atypical language development. Our regression analyses showed that the tests of our semantic battery altogether accounted for 24% of variance in expressive...

In this single case study we analyze the treatment focused on arithmetical text problems with a multiplicative structure that was offered to Lu., a 7.8-years-old child who had been diagnosed with mild mental retardation and a genetic anomaly (cariotype 47 XYY) associated with learning disabilities and language delay. Our main aim is to analyze the...

In this study we explore the development of phonological and lexical reading in dyslexic children. We tested a group of 14 Italian children who have been diagnosed with dyslexia and whose reading age is end of grade 1. We compared this group with a group of 70 typically developing children who have been tested for reading at the end of grade 1. For...

In this longitudinal study we analyse the early phases of reading development in Italian and explore the transition from phonological to lexical reading. A group of 28 Italian children was tested in four phases. Language and cognitive skills were first assessed in the preschool. Reading performance was then tested in three different sessions, in gr...

We ask whether the relationship between phonological awareness and learning to read is mediated by two other factors: familiarity with written language; impaired phonological skills. Twenty children with typical phonological development and nine subjects with phonological delay were first evaluated using a range of cognitive and language tasks. The...

This study investigated the nature of phonological delay in a group of children with specific language impairment. It was asked whether phonological errors in this group of children were generated by a slow but normal language learning process or whether they reflected a selective impairment in some representations that enhance normal acquisition a...

Recent studies of Italian past definite and past participle forms show that human performance with regular and irregular inflections is not dissociated as Clahsen's model would predict. Some performance profiles, accounted for by dual-mechanism models in terms of an underlying symbol-manipulating combinatorial procedure, are generated in Italian by...

The dual mechanism model claims that only rule-generated inflections are productive; that is, can be applied to words borrowed from other languages or derived from other grammatical categories (e.g. verbs derived from nouns or adjectives). Productivity, high generalisability and insensitivity to type or token frequency effects are intertwined prope...

The dual mechanism hypothesis argues that the apparent contrast, in English inflectional morphology, between a rule-based default procedure, generating regular past-tense forms, and listed irregular forms stored in an associative net, reflects universal constraints on the properties of possible m orphological systems. This research asked whether th...

In this study we investigate the re-introduction of referents in the Frog stories told by Italian children aged 4-10 (N = 100). We found that for every age group full nouns are the most frequent forms used for reference re-introduction. Null forms, such as clitic pronouns or person/number inflection on the verb, are the second most frequent forms....

In different languages children have been found to use past verb forms to express the meaning of 'unreality' during social pretend play. In this study, the verb forms used by 14 four-year-old Italian children in their pretend play were investigated. Results show that different Italian past verb forms tend to co-occur with different play activities....

This study concerns the mechanisms in disputes that lead children to use justifications readily, explores how children learn to produce justifications, and identifies the types of justification used in disputes by 4- and 5-year-olds. Based on a theoretical discussion about the interactive structure as a learning mechanism, two questions are address...

This study explores the role of discourse functions in children's use of because (perchi). The disputes of 172 preschoolers were analyzed in terms of interactive move, argumentative strategies, and communicative acts. Occurrences of because were identified and described. Production of because by the same subjects in the context of teacher-children...

In disputes and other conflict talk, speakers adopt two conversational roles: rejecting the addressee's position and providing some ground for their own position. Arguments used as grounds commonly show that the speaker's position is based on underlying norms and rules that are supposed to be shared by the participants. Thus, providing justificatio...

This article describes children's and teacher's talk in classroom discussion that is a kind of speech event aimed at knowledge construction. Eleven discussions attended by twelve 5-year-old children in two different social contexts and on two different subjects were recorded and analyzed. The discussions were preceded by shared activity and guided...

The way of speaking at school can transmit ways of thinking and knowing and give structure to experience and knowledge. This study aims to describe and interpret the kind of discursive practices which can be constructed in a «literacy event», in this case a particular type of classroom discussion about a story. The study integrantes a Vygotskian pe...

In this paper, episodic structure is invoked to explain decontextualised processes of discourse construction and, in particular, the use of cohesive devices in children's fantasy narratives. A total of 70 children were tested twice, at 4 and 5 years of age, and their stories were audio-taped and transcribed. The levels of narrative structure, exten...

The aim of this study is to test developmental changes in metalinguistic skills in primary school children, using the distinction proposed by Bialystock (1986) between «analyzed knowledge» and «executive control», as two components of metalinguistic awareness involved in different tasks. 60 first, second and third grade children were individually i...

This research is concerned with clarifying whether teacher’s communicative strategies affect children’s conversational relevance in classroom discourse. 34 conversations between teacher and children in a nursery school in a Rome suburb of low social class, collected with a «quasi-experimental» methodology, have been audiotaped and analysed. 5961 tu...

Studied the symbolic play behavior of 8 4–5 yr olds in 2 30-min play sessions to identify the cognitive processes that organize and process social and conventional knowledge and its representation. The Ss played in pairs using miniatures of everyday objects. Both verbal and nonverbal production were analyzed, and episodes with topic developments we...