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We investigated production of lexical stress in children with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD), all monolingual Italian speakers. The mean age of the 16 autistic children was 5.73 years and the mean age of the 16 typically developing children was 4.65 years. Picture-naming targets were five trisyllabic words that began with a weak-strong pattern of lexical stress across the initial two syllables (WS: "matita") and five trisyllabic words beginning with a strong-weak pattern (SW: "gomito"). Acoustic measures of the duration, fundamental frequency, and intensity of the first two vowels for correct word productions were used to calculate a normalised Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) for WS and SW words. Results of acoustic analyses indicated no statistically significant group differences in PVIs. Results should be interpreted in line with the exploratory nature of this study. We hope this study will encourage additional cross-linguistic studies of prosody in children's speech production. more...

Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means of picture naming of objects and actions, selected from Druks and Masterson (2000). The aim was to examine the previously reported advantage of nouns compared to verbs. Older children were faster than younger children, and naming latencies were faster for object pictures than for action pictures. For errors, the advantage of objects over actions was greater for younger children. A qualitative analysis of errors was carried out according to a classification derived by Masterson, Druks, and Gallienne (2008). Overall, 25% of the errors reflected a complete lack of knowledge of the names or of the meanings of the pictures. Most errors, however, were likely to be due to a not yet fully developed knowledge of the meaning of words labelling the pictures, or to an incomplete conceptual representation, and this pattern was more marked for action concepts. more...

Author(s): Marina Giampietro [sup.1] , Simona Ruggi [sup.1] , Simona C. S. Caravita [sup.1] , Monica Gatti [sup.1] , Lucia Colombo [sup.1] , Gabriella M. Gilli [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) [...], The aim of this study was to examine the psychometric properties of the Disgust Scale-Revised (DS-R) in a large community sample in Italy. Participants (845 Italians, aged 20-46; 50.1% women) completed a battery of self-report questionnaires: the DS-R, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Big Five Observer, and the Padua Inventory. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported a six-factor dimensionality of the DS-R in the Italian population. The six-factor structure was partially scalar invariant across gender groups. The data provided some evidence of the scale's reliability for the sample. Correlations of the DS-R score with the assessed personality dimensions were consistent with the disgust literature. The six-factor dimensionality of the Italian version of the DS-R included the Animal reminder factor, which has also been found in other cultures. The second factor, which we named "Contamination by food," only partially overlapped the Contamination factor of previous samples. The four remaining factors seemed to assess distinct facets of the Core disgust factor. This also emerged in previous studies. For these four, there was only a partial overlap between the Italian and other populations, suggesting the relevance of cultural differences in the assessment of disgust. more...

In gymnosperms such as Ginkgo biloba , the arrival of pollen plays a key role in ovule development, before fertilization occurs. Accordingly, G. biloba female plants geographically isolated from male plants abort all their ovules after the pollination drop emission, which is the event that allows the ovule to capture pollen grains. To decipher the mechanism induced by pollination required to avoid ovule senescence and then abortion, we compared the transcriptomes of pollinated and unpollinated ovules at three time points after the end of the emission of pollination drop. Transcriptomic and in situ expression analyses revealed that several key genes involved in programmed cell death such as senescence and apoptosis, DNA replication, and cell cycle regulation were differentially expressed in unpollinated ovules compared to pollinated ovules. We provide evidence that the pollen captured by the pollination drop affects auxin local accumulation and might cause deregulation of key genes required for the ovule's programmed cell death, activating both the cell cycle regulation and DNA replication genes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

Italian vowels have a shorter duration before a geminate than before a singleton consonant, but a longer duration in syllables carrying stress. We asked whether children can produce the differentiation in vowel duration in singleton/geminate contexts reported for adults and whether their production changes depending on position of primary stress. Italian children (three-to-six-year-olds) and adults performed a nonword repetition. Each nonword appeared in four contexts, with the stressed/unstressed vowel preceding/following the singleton/geminate: /paˈpaso/, /papˈpaso/, ˈpapaso/, /ˈpappaso/. Acoustic analyses on the duration of the vowel preceding (V1) and following (V2) the medial consonant showed a type of consonant by age group interaction: the difference in vowel duration between children and adults was greater for geminate than singleton contexts, and was greater when the vowel carried stress. When V1 carried stress, its duration was shorter in the geminate than in the singleton in adults and older children, not in younger children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] more...

In polysyllabic languages the assignment of stress is crucial for understanding the reading process. Here we review empirical evidence, drawn mainly from studies on Italian, and discuss critical issues in understanding reading. We first discuss the lexical and sublexical mechanisms responsible for stress assignment and propose that the former is based on item-specific knowledge and the latter on the statistical-distributional knowledge that readers have acquired about their language. Then we examine the idea that stress and phonemes pertain to two dimensions of the word, which can be placed at two different representational levels. Finally, we analyze the effects of stress assignment on word articulation, a promising field for future investigation. These issues are addressed by reviewing the studies conducted in adult and young readers to outline the developmental trajectory of stress assignment and discuss how it operates in the reading system. more...

Italian has regular spelling-sound correspondences; however, assignment of lexical stress is unpredictable. Sensitivity to stress neighborhood information was investigated by constructing three types of three-syllabic nonwords: nonwords with word-endings characterized by a strong neighborhood of dominant stress words (dominant), nonwords with word-endings characterized by a strong neighborhood of non-dominant stress words (non-dominant), and nonwords with word-endings characterized by weak and/or inconsistent stress neighborhoods (ambivalent). Examples of these three types of nonwords were used as targets in a priming experiment. Examples of two of these types of nonwords (dominant and non-dominant) were used as primes. Adults (Experiment 1) and second and fourth-grade children (Experiment 2) were tested in a reading aloud task, and percentage of responses with dominant stress was measured. Children were sensitive to item-specific stress neighborhood information, but less so than adults. Children demonstrated more marked effects of dominant stress, effects that appear to decrease with age. Children also showed smaller effects of prosodic priming compared to adults. The results are in line with a statistical approach to learning. more...

In the present study, the effect of phonological and working memory mechanisms involved in spelling Italian single words was explored in two groups of children matched for grade level: a group of normally hearing children and a group of pre-verbally deaf children, with severe-to-profound hearing loss. Three-syllable and four-syllable familiar words were presented to the two groups for spelling to dictation. Three conditions were used: simple spelling, concurrent articulation, and foot tapping. Verbal digit span was also assessed. Overall, the performance of deaf children tended to be lower compared to hearing children, but not significantly so. Concurrent articulation produced more errors than tapping in both groups. Regression analyses showed that the main predictor in all three tasks was school level, however the proportion of variance explained by this factor was much greater in the dual tasks, in particular in concurrent articulation. Qualitative analyses of errors showed a worse performance of deaf children, with a greater proportion of mixed errors compared to hearing children. They also showed a greater proportion of phonologically plausible errors compared to hearing children, presumably due to their deprived auditory representation, and/or to phonological representations that rely to a large extent on lip reading and kinesthetic and visual perception of articulatory gestures. more...