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Introduction
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March 2007 - August 2015
Publications
Publications (70)
Children differ in their environmental sensitivity (ES), which can be measured observationally or by self-report questionnaire. A parent-report scale represents an important tool for investigating ES in younger children but has to be psychometrically robust and valid. In the current multistudy, we validated the parent-report version of the Highly S...
The ability to establish a connection between the direction of the other's gaze and the object that is observed has important implications in the development of social cognition and learning. In this study, we analyzed alpha and theta band oscillations in one group of 9-month-old infants by implementing a face-to-face live paradigm, which presented...
Time perception is not always veridical, but it can be modulated by changes in internal and external context. The most-acknowledged theory in this regard hypothesises the existence of an internal clock allowing us to subjectively estimate time intervals. The aim of the present study is to investigate the possible effect of such an internal clock, m...
Mind-mindedness (MM) refers to caregivers’ proclivity to treat a child as having an active and autonomous
mental life. It has been shown to be a powerful predictor of many developmental outcomes and to
mitigate the impact of risk conditions. However, longitudinal studies on MM reporting changes over
time and individual differences among mothers hav...
Anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccines appear to be the only escape from the COVID-19 pandemic. As healthcare workers were among the first in society to be vaccinated, understanding their emotional status post-vaccination is fundamental to the promotion of COVID-19 vaccines among the rest of society. The aims of this study were to investigate the predictors of p...
Children differ in their Environmental Sensitivity (ES), which can be measured observationally or by self-report questionnaire. A parent-report scale represents an important tool for investigating ES in younger children but has to be psychometrically robust and valid. In the current multi-study, we validated the parent-report version of the Highly...
Infant-directed speech (IDS), the particular form of spontaneous language observed in interactions between parents and their infants, is a crucial aspect of the mother-infant interaction and an index of the attunement of maternal linguistic input to her infant communicative abilities and needs during dyadic interactions. The present study aimed to...
Previous studies consistently showed age-related differences in temporal judgment and temporal memory. Importantly, emotional valence plays a crucial role in older adults' information processing. In this study, we examined the effects of emotions at the intersection between time and memory, analysing age-related differences in a temporal source mem...
The interplay of parenting and environmental sensitivity on children’s behavioral adjustment during, and immediately after, the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions was investigated in two longitudinal studies involving Italian preschoolers (Study 1, N = 72; 43% girls, M years = 3.82(1.38)) and primary school children (Study 2, N = 94; 55% girls, M years...
Background:
The lockdown imposed to contain the COVID-19 pandemic brought deep changes in the daily life of Italian children and adolescents, increasing the time spent at home. This study aims to explore how activities that children and adolescents carried out at home during the lockdown were related to their emotional and behavioral wellbeing.
M...
Background: Lockdown due to Covid-19 pandemic brought deep changes to the daily lives of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), greatly increasing their amount of time spent at home.
Methods: A cohort of 243 parents of children with ASD (2-15 years old) completed an original online survey regarding the child’s screen time and the modificatio...
Key points:
Synchronized TMS pulses with pre-defined brain oscillatory phases allows to evaluate the impact of brain states on TMS effects. TMS pulses over M1 at the negative peak of μ-frequency band induces higher phase-lock synchronization with interconnected contralateral homologous regions. Cortico-cortical synchronization changes are linearly...
Background
The lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a difficult period for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and their families.
Aims
The aim of this study was to investigate the predictors of the quality of life (QoL) of children with ASD and their parents throughout the first lockdown, providing a snapshot of the impact of...
Validation of the Chieti Affective Action Videos (CAAV) database was replicated with a sample of older adults (age range 65–93). When designing experimental studies of emotions, it is crucial to take into consideration the differences in emotional processing between young and older adults. Therefore, the main goal of the present study was to provid...
Introduction
Globally, around 10% of children are born preterm and are more at risk of negative developmental outcomes. However, empirical evidences and theoretical reasoning also suggest that premature birth can be a susceptibility factor, increasing sensitivity to the environment for better and for worse. Because available findings are controvers...
Imaginary companion (IC) – an invisible playmate invented by some children – is a fascinating but little explored phenomenon. While some studies highlight the protective role of IC on pre-schoolers’ development, it’s still unclear the IC function for socio-emotional adjustment in schoolers. With the current study we aim to contribute to fill this g...
Combining Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) with electroencephalography (EEG) offers the opportunity to study signal propagation dynamics at high temporal resolution in the human brain. TMS pulse induces a local effect which propagates across cortical networks engaging distant cortical and subcortical sites. However, the degree of propagation...
Oral health care can be a difficult experience for a child with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), for their family and for the dentist. The purpose of this study is to provide an understanding of the challenges experienced by the three aforementioned figures during oral care treatment. A cohort of 275 parents of typical development children (TD), 57...
Objective
To study the use of the Children's Sleep Habits Questionnaire (CSHQ) to evaluate sleep problems dimensions, norm values, and association of sleep problems with behavioral problems in Italian preschoolers.
Design
Sleep dimensions in CSHQ were investigated via parallel and principal component analyses, norm and at-risk values were investig...
This research revealed that the frequency of reported parent-infant singing interactions predicted 6-month-old infants' performance in laboratory music experiments and mediated their language development in the second year. At 6 months, infants (n = 36) were tested using a preferential listening procedure assessing their sustained attention to inst...
When adults speak or sing with infants, they sound differently than in adult communication. Infant-directed (ID) communication helps caregivers to regulate infants' emotions and helps infants to process speech information, at least from ID-speech. However, it is largely unclear whether infants might also process speech information presented in ID-s...
Previous studies reported an inconsistency between verbal extracts and emotional physiological activation in dismissing individuals when narrating their early caregiving experience at the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). This study aimed to explore this discrepancy by analyzing the degree of concordance between verbal content and prosodic characte...
The preterm birth of a child is a sudden event that can disturb the overall family system and its functioning. Many studies have been conducted with the aim of exploring how and the degree to which this event affects the early mother-infant dyadic relationship and maternal well-being, with often mixed findings. The present study investigates the co...
Lionetti F, Fasolo M, Dellagiulia A. On the role of moderator on children’s sleep health in response to COVID-19. J Clin Sleep Med. 2021;17(2):353–354.
The preterm birth of a child is a sudden event that can disturb the overall family system and its functioning. Many studies have been conducted with the aim of exploring how and the degree to which this event affects the early mother-infant dyadic relationship and maternal well-being, with often mixed findings. The present study investigates the co...
The COVID-19 outbreak imposed to Italian families many changes in their daily life increasing the risk of developing psychological problems. The present study explored risk factors associated with parenting stress and implications for children's emotion regulation in families with different socioeconomic risks. Parents of 2-14 years old children co...
Objectives: The present study aimed to explore the effect of risk factors associated with the COVID-19 outbreak experience on parents' and children's well-being. Methods: Parents of children aged between 2- and 14-years-old completed an online survey reporting their home environment conditions, any relation they had to the pandemic consequences, th...
Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a specific register that adults use to address infants, and it is characterised by prosodic exaggeration and lexical and syntactic simplification. Several authors have underlined that this simplified speech becomes more complex according to the infant's age. However, there is a lack of studies on lexical and syntacti...
Several studies have demonstrated the role of narrative competence in predicting later academic achievement, but only a few authors tried to highlight exact relationships between the different aspects of these two complex domains. The main aim of the present work was to investigate this association considering the micro- and macrostructural levels...
Temperament is an individual aspect that strictly affects infants and children engagement with the environment and it is supposed to play a role in the acquiring of new competences. Several studies focused on the possible influence of temperament in the process of language acquisition in early childhood reporting not consistent findings. Since mate...
This study aimed to investigate specific associations between structural and acoustic characteristics of infant-directed (ID) speech and word recognition. Thirty Italian acquiring children and their mothers were tested when the children were 1;3. Children’s word recognition was measured with the looking-while-listening task. Maternal ID speech was...
Maternal mind-mindedness has been shown to be a powerful predictor of many developmental outcomes and to buffer the impact of psychosocial risk conditions, but no study has investigated whether this parental feature might support child development in the presence of biological risk, such as preterm birth. The present study addresses this gap, by in...
Introduction. Since serial ordering has an important role in both language development and learning abilities, the present study aims to describe a new instrument, the Sequential Reasoning Task [SRT], specifically designed to assess children’s ability to place events in temporal order.
Methods. Participants were 200 typically developing children, r...
This study aimed to investigate specific associations between structural and acoustic characteristics of infant-directed (ID) speech and word recognition. Thirty Italian-acquiring children and their mothers were tested when the children were 1;3. Children’s word recognition was measured with the looking-while-listening task. Maternal ID speech was...
Emotional activation can be detected by the prosodic properties of the voice. This study aimed to explore the match between the valence of the words used by secure and dismissing women in describing the relationship with their parents during the Adult Attachment Interview and their emotional activation as expressed through the prosody of the voice....
Mind-mindedness (MM) refers to the caregivers’ tendency to treat the child as an individual with a mind, rather than merely an entity with needs that must be satisfied (Meins & Fernyhough, 2006). Besides few studies reporting stability of MM between two time points, (e.g., Meins et al., 2011), longitudinal investigations of MM are scant. The study...
The aim of the present study was to examine the use of gestures in the narrative productions of preschool children. Both the developmental patterns of and the relationships between gestures and verbal production were analysed. The participants included 45 preschool children, aged 38 to 71 months. The narrative competence of each child was assessed...
The present study examined narrative competence and its relationships
with syntactic and prosodic skills in preschool children. The narrative skills
of 30 typically developing Italian children were assessed during their first
year of kindergarten attendance (T1) and again 1 year later (T2). A picture
book was used to elicit children’s narratives. A...
Crying represents one of the main means of infant communication during their first months of life. Although several researchers dealt with the exploration of the acoustic characteristics of different cries, as well as with the investigation of the role played by cries in determining the stress in the caregiver and the maternal ability to recognize...
Analysis and description of Italian children’s prosody for narrative speech in an Autosegmental-Metrical framework.
Background: Many studies have analysed language development in children with Down syndrome to better understand the nature of their linguistic delays and the reason why these delays, particularly those in the morphosyntactic area, seem greater than their cognitive impairment. However, the prosodic characteristics of language development in children...
This study explored if the quality of mothers’ reported child-rearing experiences influences the prosodic and linguistic features of maternal child-directed speech. Lexical, syntactic, functional and prosodic aspects of maternal speech directed towards their 24-month-old children were examined. Results showed that mothers with different child-reari...
Objective:
The premature birth of their infant can constitute a sudden interruption of the transition to motherhood that requires a reorganisation of the process. The present study aimed to analyse the experience of the transition to motherhood of preterm infants' mothers, framing it within Stern's transition to motherhood theory (Stern, 1995).
M...
Six- to 11-year-old children?s attitudes toward thin,
average-weight, and overweight targets were investigated with associated warmth and
competence stereotypes. The results showed positive attitudes toward average-weight
targets and negative attitudes toward overweight peers: Both attitudes decreased as a
function of children?s age. Thin targets w...
Mind-Mindedness (MM) indica la propensione del caregiver a trattare il bambino come agente dotato di stati mentali piuttosto che semplicemente come un essere con bisogni biologici da soddisfare (Meins et al., 2012). E. Meins e C. Fernyhough (2010) distinguono tra commenti MM appropriati e non-attuned: i primi riflettono in modo accurato lo stato me...
Several studies have analyzed language development in children with Down syndrome because language development delays in these children have been reported to be greater than their cognitive level would suggest (Abbeduto, Warren & Conners 2007). However, prosodic characteristics of their language have been minimally investigated (Stojanovik 2011). T...
The aim of the present study was to evaluate relationships between early production of gesture, gesture-plus-word combinations and transitional forms on successive lexical and syntactic skills. Twenty-four children interacting with their mothers were observed. We found that complementary gesture-plus-word combinations and transitional forms use at...
The lexical and structural characteristics of the maternal input addressed to 24-month-old children with Down syndrome were compared to the input addressed to two groups of typically developing children; matched for chronological age (CA Group) and lexical skills (Vocabulary Group), respectively. The aim of the study was to verify whether the chara...
This study investigates from a developmental point of view the lexical, morphological, and syntactic characteristics of verb production during the first stages of language acquisition. The spontaneous productions of children with different mean length of utterance (MLU) were analysed, examining the relative production of different types of verbs (t...
The objective of this study is to evaluate language outcome in pre-term children, considering multiple factors. The hypothesis is that early communicative capacity (pre-verbal communicative utterances) is affected mainly by biological (prematurity, birth weight, and gender) and social factors (maternal education), while more advanced linguistic abi...
This study analysed the early linguistic development of Italian pre-term children. Samples of spontaneous pre-linguistic and verbal production were recorded at 12 and 18 months of age from two groups of children: 24 pre-term children and 15 full-term children. The Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates Questionnaire was administered at 24 months of...
The purpose of this study was to investigate, in a group of Italian children, the development of the capacity to use prosodic features to mark different syntactic organizations of multi-word utterances, during the first phase of syntactic acquisition. The focus is on the prosodic realizations of multi-word utterances in which children begin to use...
The purpose of this study was to investigate, in a group of Italian children, the development of the capacity to use prosodic features to mark different syntactic organizations of multi-word utterances, during the first phase of syntactic acquisition. The focus is on the prosodic realizations of multi-word utterances in which children begin to use...
This study examined early vocal production to assess whether it is possible to identify predictors of vocabulary development prior to the age point at which lexical delay is usually identified. Characteristics of babbling and first words in 12 Italian children with slow expressive development (late talkers; LT) were compared with those of 12 typica...
The vocabulary development of 24 Italian children aged between 1;4 and 1;6 at the beginning of the study was longitudinally monitored on a monthly basis using the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory drawn up by their mothers. This study analyzes data from children for whom two sampling stages were available; the fir...
Keywords:
The development of gestural communication has been investigated in two groups of infants, sampled from a larger corpus of infants whose vocabulary development was investigated from 18 to 30 months of age. The first group (late talkers) comprised infants who at 24 months of age produced less than 50 words or did not produced any word comb...
Projects
Project (1)
Mind-mindedness refers to caregivers' proclivity to treat their child as a mental, active agent (e.g., Mother to her infant: you like this toy very much, and you want to keep playing with it). When appropriate, this parental mindreading ability has an important role for the child's later social, emotional, and cognitive development because it provides children with the opportunity to better understand, recognize, and label their own and others' mental states.
In this 4-waves longitudinal study we investigated the normative developmental pathways of maternal mind-mindedness throughout the first year of life in an Italian community sample: we tested temporal stability and continuity, while examining the role of maternal characteristics (sensitivity, age, education, SES) in explaining individual differences over time.