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September 2011 - present
Publications
Publications (44)
For some deaf people, sign language is the preferred language, the one in which they feel most comfortable. However, there are very few assessment tools developed or adapted for sign languages. The aim of this study was to translate and adapt in Italian Sign Language (LIS) the Italian version of the Youth Quality of Life Instrument—Deaf and Hard of...
In this study, our objective was to explore the impact of hearing loss on the conceptual system underlying word meaning. We collected perceptual strength norms for 200 Italian words from early deaf individuals with limited or no access to auditory information and compared them to existing norms from hearing individuals. For each word, participants...
Specific Learning Disorder (SLD) is a complex disorder with a strong genetic component, characterized by varying manifestations and considerable differences among children. Several studies have highlighted that difficulties in language acquisition and the presence of Developmental Language Disorders (DLDs) are frequently associated with SLD, sugges...
In spoken languages, face masks represent an obstacle to speech understanding and influence metacognitive judgments, reducing confidence and increasing effort while listening. To date, all studies on face masks and communication involved spoken languages and hearing participants, leaving us with no insight on how masked communication impacts on non...
The literature on the role of gestures in children with language delay (LD) is partial and controversial. The present study explores gestural production and modality of expression in children with LD and semantic and temporal relationships between gestures and words in gesture + word combinations. Thirty-three children participated (mean age, 26 mo...
It is a common feeling that girls speak earlier than boys; however, whether or not there are gender differences in early language acquisition remains controversial. The present paper aims to review the research on gender effects in early language acquisition and development, to determine whether, and from which age, an advantage for girls does even...
Deaf and hearing children exposed to a spoken language and a signed language acquire and use both of these languages, and thus become bimodal bilinguals. Unlike unimodal bilinguals, bimodal bilinguals can mix the two languages in a simultaneous manner, thus producing signs and spoken words at the same time (code-blends). Studies on code-blending in...
Background:
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is frequent in childhood and may have long-term sequelae. By employing an evidence-based approach, this scoping review aims at identifying (a) early predictors of DLD; (b) the optimal age range for the use of screening and diagnostic tools; (c) effective diagnostic tools in preschool children.
Met...
Assessing language development in bilingual children is challenging in geographical areas where bilinguals have different native languages. Lexical development measures are often used as a starting point to study linguistic abilities in bilingual children. Non-word repetition (NWR) has been found to be very informative in detecting variation. The p...
Introduction:
The short forms of MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI) are widely used for assessing communicative and linguistic development in infants and toddlers. Italian norms for the Words and Gestures (WG) and Words and Sentences (WS) short forms overlap between 18 and 24 months.
Objective:
To evaluate the agreeme...
In early communicative development, children with Down syndrome (DS) make extensive use of gestures to compensate for articulatory difficulties. Here, we analyzed the symbolic strategies that underlie this gesture production, compared to that used by typically developing children. Using the same picture-naming task, 79 representational gestures pro...
The present study investigates the types of verb and symbolic representational strategies used by 10 deaf signing adults and 13 deaf signing children who described in Italian Sign Language 45 video clips representing nine action types generally communicated by five general verbs in spoken Italian. General verbs, in which the same sign was produced...
Deaf children in Italy are provided with different types of schooling. Few public schools offer a bilingual curriculum for deaf and hearing students that involves consistent use of Italian and Italian Sign Language (LIS) within the classroom and in which LIS is taught as a subject. One of these schools, the Tommaso Silvestri Primary School, located...
The aim of this study is to explore the impact of auditory deprivation and communication mode on written language processing
One of the most popular and widely used parent report instruments for assessing early language acquisition is the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). This study compares normative data of the Italian Words and Sentences complete form (WS-CF) and short form (WS-SF). The samples included 752 children for the WS-CF and 816...
We review major developmental evidence on the continuity from action to gesture to word and sign in human children, highlighting the important role of caregivers in the development of multimodal communication. In particular, the basic issues considered here and contributing to the current debate on the origins and development of the language-ready...
The aim of this study is to analyze Italian Sign Language (LIS) linguistic skills in two groups of deaf signing children at different ages, and to compare their skills with those of a group of deaf signing adults. For this purpose, we developed a new Sentence Reproduction Task (SRT) for Italian Sign Language (LIS-SRT), which we administered to 33 p...
What is linguistic communication and what is it not? Even if we often convey meanings through visible bodily actions, these are rarely considered part of human language. However, co-verbal gestures have compositional structure and semantic significance, while highly iconic structures are essential in sign languages. This paper offers a review of ma...
Cognitive dysfunction involves 40–65 % of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. It can be detected in all MS phenotypes from the early stages of the disease, and it tends to progress over time. Minimal Assessment of Cognitive Function in MS (MACFIMS) has been proved to be the most sensitive and comprehensive battery available for MS cognitive assessmen...
In 2 experiments we investigated attentional orienting to nonpredictive social and nonsocial cues in deaf observers. In Experiment 1a, 22 early deaf adults and 23 hearing controls performed a peripheral shape-discrimination task, while uninformative central gaze cues validly and invalidly cued the location of the target. As an adaptation to the lac...
Previous work investigating the consequence of bilateral deafness on attentional selection suggests that experience-dependent changes in this population may result in increased automatic processing of stimulus-driven visual information (e.g., saliency). However, adaptive behavior also requires observers to prioritize goal-driven information relevan...
To address the negative effects of deafness on spoken language acquisition, many clinicians suggest using cochlear implant (CI) and oral education and advise against sign language, even when combined with spoken language (i.e., bilingualism), believing that it may slow down spoken language development. In a deaf child with CI who was exposed at an...
Lexical comprehension and production is directly evaluated for the first time in deaf signing children below the age of 3 years. A Picture Naming Task was administered to 8 deaf signing toddlers (aged 2-3 years) who were exposed to Sign Language since birth. Results were compared with data of hearing speaking controls. In both deaf and hearing chil...
This chapter presents theoretical issues relevant to the study of early unimodal and bimodal bilingualism, based on our experience in Italy. The discussion will look at similarities and differences between unimodal and bimodal bilingualism and examine methodological issues to be considered in assessing the development of deaf bimodal bilingual chil...
An increasing number of deaf children received cochlear implants (CI) in the first years of life, but no study has focused on linguistic and pragmatic skills in children with CI younger than 3 years of age.
To estimate the percentage of children who had received a CI before 2 years of age whose linguistic skills were within the normal range; to com...
Evidence indicates that adequate phonological abilities are necessary to develop proficient reading skills and that later in life phonology also has a role in the covert visual word recognition of expert readers. Impairments of acoustic perception, such as deafness, can lead to atypical phonological representations of written words and letters, whi...
(file format Excel 97/2000/XP) provides Lexical Decision response time for correct categorizations.
(ZIP)
Data from 492 Italian infants (8-18 months) were collected with the parental questionnaire MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories to describe early actions and gestures (A-G) "vocabulary" and its relation with spoken vocabulary in both comprehension and production. A-G were more strongly correlated with word comprehension than word p...
The authors studied the effect of the cochlear implant (CI) on language comprehension and production in deaf children who had received a CI in the 2nd year of life.
The authors evaluated lexical and morphosyntactic skills in comprehension and production in 17 Italian children who are deaf (M = 54 months of age) with a CI and in 2 control groups of...
We explored the syllabic and phonetic properties of the words included in the «Primo Vocabolario del Bambino» (Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI), in order to observe their influence on the age of lexical acquisition and the percentage of Italian children (out of 752) producing each word between 18-36 months. The majority of words have two...
In diesem Beitrag stelle ich eine Methode vor, die den gesteuerten Zweitspracherwerb für Kinder erleichtert. Die Methodik
stützt sich auf psycholinguistische und entwicklungspsychologische Forschungsergebnisse, die dem Prozess des Lernens Rechnung
tragen. Das Lernen soll möglichst den natürlichen Bedingungen des Zweitspracherwerbs entsprechen. Dazu...
Chiunque si occupi del primo sviluppo linguistico sa che l’aspetto fonetico delle parole da produrre rappresenta per il bambino una sfida non meno importante di quella rappresentata dagli aspetti cognitivi. È lecito quindi supporre che la complessità nell’organizzazione del controllo motorio che è implicata nella produzione delle prime parole possa...
We evaluated language development in deaf Italian preschoolers with hearing parents, taking into account the duration of formal
language experience (i.e., the time elapsed since wearing a hearing aid and beginning language education) and different methods
of language education. Twenty deaf children were matched with 20 hearing children for age and...
The CFVlexvar.xls database includes imageability, frequency, and grammatical properties of the first words acquired by Italian children. For each of 519 words that are known by children 18-30 months of age (taken from Caselli & Casadio's, 1995, Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory), new values of imageability are pro...
This study explores imageability, frequency and grammatical properties of the first words acquired by Italian children. For each of 527 words that are known by children of 18- 30 months (taken from the Italian version of the «MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory » by Caselli and Casadio, 1995), new values of imageability have been collecte...