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This study investigates the parsing of Italian Wh-questions of the Which-N type. The extraction site could be either the subject or the object noun phrase. The verb following the Which-noun was either a singular or a plural form, immediately disambiguating the Which-N argument role through verb agreement. Reading time on the verb and on the post-verbal noun phrase were significantly shorter for the subject Wh-question than for the object Wh-question. Multi-channel ERP data showed increased P600 amplitudes for the object questions in response to the critical word on the left temporal lobe in the superior temporal gyrus. These findings are in line with the Minimal Chain Principle (De Vincenzi 1991a) and provide further evidence for the hypothesis that the amplitude and duration of the P600 involve multi-dimensional processes controlling operations such as prediction, retrieval, revising, and structure-building operations needed for assembly (and disassembly) of syntactic relations.

The increasing number of primary students with different degrees of exposure to a family minority language requires a reflection on whether and how specific aspects of their daily language experience influence their learning skills. Indeed, Minority Language Children (MLC) often report difficulties in fluent and accurate reading that must be better investigated to exclude neurodevelopmental conditions such as dyslexia.To this aim, we developed a new instrument, the Daily Linguistic Practice Interview (in Italian, the "Prassi Linguistiche Quotidiane" – PLQ Interview). It allows to collect information about the linguistic practice and use in the family (Scale A) and extra-family context (Scale B) and about the child’s linguistic preferences and habits (Scale C). The Interview further provides analogic quantitative measures of minority language active speaking with mother, father, and passive listening, in the form of clocks to paint.The relationship between all these linguistic aspects and reading skills was investigated on 79 MLC aged 8 to 11 y.o. through a correlational approach and several regression models. Our results show that family and extra-family language use influence accurate lexical recognition. At the same time, a “mother effect” broadly affects reading skills in the majority language. In line with these findings, promoting balanced bilingualism in school is relevant for supporting learning skills. Moreover, according to our data, a more careful evaluation of learning disorders should be done on MLC with ad hoc standardized tests and by also considering family language exposure.

Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a learning disorder characterized by specific difficulties in learning to read accurately and fluently, which has been generally explained in terms of phonological deficits. Recent research has shown that individuals with DD experience timing difficulties in the domains of language, music perception and motor control, probably due to impaired rhythmic perception, suggesting that timing deficit might be a key underlying factor to explain such a variety of difficulties. The present work presents two experiments aimed at assessing the anticipatory ability on a given rhythm of 9-year old Italian children and Italian adults with and without DD. Both adults and children with DD displayed a greater timing error and were more variable than controls in high predictable stimuli. No difference between participants with and without DD was found in the control condition, in which the uncertain timing of the beat did not permit the extraction of regularities. These results suggest that both children and adults with DD are unable to exploit temporal regularities to efficiently anticipate the next sensory event whereas control participants easily are. By showing that the anticipatory timing system of individuals with Developmental Dyslexia appears affected, this study adds another piece of evidence to the multifaceted reality of Developmental Dyslexia.

In this commentary on the Special Issue, I will address the question of what memory spans measure concerning language, as language has, at least, a linear and a hierarchical dimension. I suggest that if anything what is measured has to do with the linear dimension. Then, I will discuss the welcome results on bilingual children with language problems and reflect on what it means that working memory measures seem to be more relevant for bilingual children than for monolingual ones. I will tentatively suggest that what is at stake is not memory per se, but inhibitory skills.

It is well-recognized that individuals with dyslexia may exhibit a broad range of deficits that go beyond reading itself. One line of research has uncovered impairments in the production and processing of rhythm in individuals with dyslexia. There is also a growing body of evidence that individual differences in rhythmic skills explain variability in reading, language and motor abilities in individuals with and without dyslexia. In this opinion article, we offer a new theoretical approach to the nature of the impaired rhythmic mechanisms associated with dyslexia. Specifically, we propose that the reading, language and motor impairments associated with dyslexia may be ,in part, attributed to a deficit in anticipation i.e., a component of the rhythmic behaviour. This hypothesis will be referred to as the Inefficient Anticipation Hypothesis.

In this study, we validated the “ReadFree tool”: a computerized battery of 12 hierarchically organized tasks in the visual and auditory modalities, which do not imply reading. The tool has been developed to identify poor readers irrespective of their specific language background, thus, to be also suitable for Minority-Language Children (MLC).Each task's discriminant power was tested on 142 Italian-monolingual participants (8-13 years-old) that either presented a reading deficit (i.e., monolingual poor readers (mPR); N = 37) or not (i.e., monolingual good readers (mGR); N = 105). The performances at the discriminant tasks were analysed by means of a multivariate machine learning approach based on a classification and regression tree (CART) model to classify mPR versus mGR.To test the diagnostic accuracy of the ReadFree tool in MLC, we first compared reading and ReadFree tool performances in MLC (N = 68) with those in monolingual readers (mGR + mPR; N = 142). The two groups did not show any significant differences, suggesting that (i) the two samples had the same distribution of good and poor readers and (ii) the ReadFree tool can be used to test MLC without introducing any systematic bias associated with their language use experience and exposure. Secondly, the MLC’s CART classification of good and poor readers was compared to the one obtained by adopting clinical reading tests standardized on Italian monolingual children. Interestingly, the percentage of MLC evaluated as poor readers through the standardized reading tests was higher than the one produced by the ReadFree tool. This evidence supports the idea that reading tasks standardized also on MLC population are needed.

The ability of assessing any type of linguistic complexity of any given contents could potentially improve knowledge reproduction, especially tacit knowledge which can be expensive during a pandemic. In this paper, we develop a simple and crosslinguistic model of complexity which considers formal accounts on the study of linguistic systems, but can be easily implemented by non-linguists' groups, e.g., communication experts and policymakers. To test our model, we conduct a study on a corpus extracted from the World Health Organization (WHO)'s emergency learning platform in 6 languages. Data extracted from open-access encyclopaedic entries act as control groups. The results show that the measurements adopted signal a trend for a minimization of complexity and can be exploited as features for (automatic) text classification. publishedVersion

Research dialogue between Maria Teresa Guasti, Università di Milano-Bicocca and Duncan Astle, University of Cambridge on the topic of atypical language development in children. Maria Teresa Guasti presents her research on 'Dyslexia as a Window into Language', followed by Duncan Astle's presentation 'Beyond the label: A transdiagnostic approach to understanding cognitive difficulties in childhood'. The session is chaired by Prof. Henriëtte Hendriks, Theoretical & Applied Linguistics section, University of Cambridge.

A large number of children worldwide are only exposed to their L2 around 3years of age and can exhibit linguistic behaviours that resemble those of a child with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). This can lead to under- or over-identification of DLD in this population. This study endeavors to contribute to overcoming this problem, by determining whether two specific clinical markers used with the Italian monolingual population can also be used with early L2 acquiring children, namely clitic production and non-word repetition. Our study involved two groups of 5-year-old L2 learners of Italian from various language backgrounds; 18 children had been referred to Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) services (EL2_DLD), and 30 children were typically developing (EL2_TD). The participants completed an Italian clitic production task and a non-word repetition task based on Italian phonotactics. Data was also collected from the participants’ caregivers with the ALDeQ Parental Questionnaire to obtain information about the children’s L1. Our results suggest that non-word repetition and clitic production in Italian are potentially useful for identifying L2 learners of Italian with DLD, at the age of 5years. The repetition of non-words is highly accurate in identifying children with DLD among the participants, while clitic production is somewhat less discriminative in this sample. This study is a first step towards uncovering clinical markers that could be used to determine the presence of DLD in children acquiring their L2.

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response study, we show that null and overt pronouns are processed differently. Specifically, null pronouns are found to be less costly to process than overt pronouns. We argue that this difference is caused by an additional reasoning step that is needed to process marked overt pronouns but not unmarked null pronouns. A comparison with data from Dutch, a language with overt but no null pronouns, demonstrates that Italian pronouns are processed differently from Dutch pronouns. These findings suggest that the processing of a marked form is influenced by alternative forms within the same language, making its processing costly.

Reduced forms such as the pronoun he provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as the lead singer of Coldplay. Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade-off between the informativity of a form and the prominence of its referent. For example, Italian adults generally interpret informationally empty null pronouns as in the sentence Corre (meaning “He/She/It runs”) as referring to the most prominent referent in the discourse, and more informative overt pronouns (e.g., lui in Lui corre, “He runs”) as referring to less prominent referents. Although children acquiring Italian are known to experience difficulties interpreting pronouns, it is unclear how they acquire this division of pragmatic labor between null and overt subject pronouns, and how this relates to the development of their cognitive capacities. Here we show that cognitive development can account for the general interpretation patterns displayed by Italian-speaking children and adults. Using experimental studies and computational simulations in a framework modeling bounded-rational behavior, we argue that null pronoun interpretation is influenced by working memory capacity and thus appears to depend on discourse context, whereas overt pronoun interpretation is influenced by processing speed, suggesting that listeners must reason about the speaker's choices. Our results demonstrate that cognitive capacities may constrain the acquisition of linguistic forms and their meanings in various ways. The novel predictions generated by the computational simulations point out several directions for future research.

In English, a sentence like “The cat didn’t eat the carrot or the pepper” typicallyreceives a “neither” interpretation; in Japanese it receives a “not this or notthat” interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation,such that the “neither” interpretation (strong reading) asymmetricallyentails the “not this or not that” interpretation (weak reading). This asymmetricalentailment raises a learnability problem. According to the SemanticSubset Principle, all language learners, regardless of the language they areexposed to, start by assigning the strong reading, since this interpretationmakes such sentences true in the narrowest range of circumstances.). If the“neither” interpretation is children’s initial hypothesis, then children acquiringa superset language will be able to revise their initial hypothesis on thebasis of positive evidence.The aim of the present study is to test an additional account proposed byPagliarini, Crain, Guasti (2018) as a possible explanation for the earlier convergence to the adult grammar by Italian children. The hypothesis testedhere is that the presence of a lexical form such as recursive né that unambiguously conveys a “neither” meaning, would lead children to convergeearlier to the adult grammar due to a blocking e!ect of the recursive né formin the inventory of negated disjunction forms in a language. We compareddata from Italian (taken from Pagliarini, Crain, Guasti, 2018), French,Hungarian and Dutch. Dutch was tested as baseline language. French andHungarian have – similarly to Italian – a lexical form that unambiguouslyexpresses the “neither” interpretation (ni ni and sem sem, respectively). Ourresults did not support this hypothesis however, and are discussed in thelight of language-specifc particularities of the syntax and semantics ofnegation.

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. Methods. We considered systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and primary observational studies with control groups on predictive, sensitivity and specificity values of screening and diagnostic tools and psycholinguistic measures for the assessment of DLD in preschool children. We identified 37 studies, consisting of 10 systematic reviews and 27 primary studies. Results. Delay in gesture production, receptive and/or expressive vocabulary, syntactic comprehension, or word combination up to 30 months emerged as early predictors of DLD, a family history of DLD appeared to be a major risk factor, and low socioeconomic status and environmental input were reported as risk factors with lower predictive power. Optimal time for screening is suggested between age 2 and 3, for diagnosis around age 4. Because of the high variability of sensitivity and specificity values, joint use of standardized and psycholinguistic measures is suggested to increase diagnostic accuracy. Conclusions. Monitoring risk situations and employing caregivers’ reports, clinical assessment and multiple linguistic measures are fundamental for an early identification of DLD and timely interventions.

In English, the sentence Mary didn’t eat pizza or sushi is assigned the neither interpretation (both disjuncts must be false). In Mandarin Chinese, the equivalent sentence is assigned the at least one interpretation (at least one disjunct must be false). The cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of negative sentences with disjunction has been attributed to the Disjunction Parameter. On one value of this lexical parameter, disjunction is a Positive Polarity Item (+PPI). On the other value, disjunction is not a Positive Polarity Item (-PPI). According to the Semantic Subset Principle (SSP), all child language learners are predicted to initially assign the neither interpretation to negative disjunctive sentences, for reasons of language learnability. The present study investigates the interpretation of negative sentences with disjunction in Catalan. The findings confirm that disjunction is +PPI for adults; children show a bimodal distribution. For some children, disjunction is -PPI, as predicted by the SSP. However, some children adopt the adult +PPI value of the Disjunction Parameter. Children’s level of linguistic maturity, as measured by a sentence repetition task, was correlated with their judgments about negative sentences with disjunction such that children with lower scores tended to adopt the -PPI value. To explain the relatively early parameter resetting by some Catalan-speaking children, as compared to children acquiring other languages where disjunction is +PPI, we discuss the possible “blocking effect” of an alternative lexical expression in Catalan, which unambiguously conveys the neither interpretation.

Previous research has shown that the production of third-person singular accusative object clitics (3DO clitics) might be taxing in Italian-speaking pre-school children with cochlear implants (CIs). We investigated this topic by assessing 3DO clitic production in 14 children with an average age of 8years, who had received CI between age 1 and 4. The first goal of the study was to analyze whether school-aged children with CIs exhibit atypical behavior in 3DO clitic production. The second goal was to analyze whether children with CIs are prone to agreement errors in case of gender mismatch between the subject and the 3DO clitic, as has been shown for normal-hearing, typically developing children. To achieve this, we used two tasks in which subject and object clitic grammatical genders were manipulated so that they would or would not match. As for the first goal, the majority of children with CIs had good performance on the clitic tasks. However, some participants’ performance was poor. The pattern of deviant responses differed among the poor performers. We believe that children with CIs showing impairments in 3DO clitic production need careful individual analysis in order to plan effective speech therapy. As for the second goal, children with CIs were more prone to agreement errors in the mismatch condition compared to the match condition; this dimension needs to be considered when assessing and eventually rehabilitating clitic production.

The acquisition of languages by children using two languages is a matter of debate as many factors contribute to the success of this type of acquisition. We focus on how the competence of dual-language children changes in their two languages as a function of length of exposure and establish whether there are reciprocal influences during language development. We examined the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in a group of 6-year-old (younger) and 8-year-old (older) Mandarin–Italian dual-language children. After 3 years of regular and intensive exposure to Italian, the younger group reached the same level of competence in the comprehension of relative clauses in their two languages, and after 5 years of exposure to Italian, the older group had a better comprehension of relative clauses in Italian than in Mandarin. Acquiring two languages leads to bidirectional influence, beyond a reciprocal support. Finally, some penalty may be observed in the acquisition of subject head-final relative clauses, which is not evident in that of subject head-initial relative clauses.

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as well as Typically Developing (TD) children, are sensitive to the same hierarchical and locality factors that characterise agreement in adult grammars. This sensitivity holds even though DLD children show accrued difficulties in more complex agreement configurations. In the first experiment, a forced-choice task was used to establish whether children are more affected in the computation of S-V agreement when an element intervenes hierarchically or linearly in the agreement relation: DLD children are more subject to attraction errors when the attractor intervenes hierarchically, indicating that DLD children discriminate between hierarchical and linear configurations. The second experiment, also conducted through a forced-choice task, shows that the computation of agreement in DLD children is more ‘fragile’ than in TD children (and also in children with a primary impairment in the phonological domain), in that it is more sensitive to the factors of complexity identified in Moscati and Rizzi's (2014) typology of agreement configurations. To capture the agreement pattern found in DLD children, we put forth a novel hypothesis: the Fragile Computation of Agreement Hypothesis. Its main tenet is that DLD children make use of the same grammatical operations employed by their peers, as demonstrated in Experiment 1, but difficulties increase as a function of the complexity of the agreement configuration.

Major concerns still surround literacy education in a foreign language during primary school. In this study, we aim to establish (1) whether bilinguals perform worse in Italian literacy tests than monolinguals; (2) whether literacy skills transfer from Italian to English. We tested 97 Italian–English bilingual first, third and fifth graders (attending two bilingual primary schools in Italy, with a simultaneous 50:50 immersion programme) and a control group of 40 monolingual Italian pupils in grades 1 and 3. All participants were tested in Italian, measuring the following skills: vocabulary, phonological awareness, reading proficiency and verbal short-term memory. Bilingual participants – who had been exposed to Italian since birth and to English within the first three years of their lives – were also tested on the same measures in English. The results showed that bilingual first graders outperformed their monolingual peers in verbal short-term memory, thus revealing a possible cognitive advantage in the early stage of literacy acquisition. Monolingual and bilingual firstand third graders did not differ in reading speed. The two groups made an almost similar number of errors, but the small difference turned out to be statistically significant. Bilingual subjects’ reading attainment was found to be within monolingual normal limits in both languages on all measures except for English reading comprehension, which, together with English vocabulary, was found to be below the English norm. Aside from reading comprehension, on all other measures bilingual children’s performance in Italian correlated with their performance in English, suggesting the presence of cross-linguistic transfer of language and reading skills.

Third-person direct object (DO) clitic pronoun production is examined through an elicited production method in pre-school– and primary school–aged groups of Italian children with specific language impairment (SLI) to establish whether there is an improvement from age 5 years to age 7 years and whether there are qualitative differences in the two groups’ responses. It was found that 5- and 7-year-old Italian children with SLI produce fewer third-person DO clitics than same-age peers. The kind of responses they provide changes: at 5 years, children with SLI tend to omit clitics, while at 7 years, they use a full noun. Production of third-person DO clitics is a persistent challenge for children with SLI and is confirmed to be a good clinical marker both at 5 and 7 years of age.

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI.

This study presents a web-based sentence comprehension test aimed at identifying high school students who are at risk for a language delay. By assessing linguistic skills on a sample of high school students with Italian as an L2 and their monolingual peers, attending a vocational school, we were able to identify a subgroup of L2 students with consistent difficulties in sentence comprehension, though their reading skills were within the average range. The same subgroup revealed to experience a lack of support within the school context, suggesting that poor L2 skills might be a critical variable to consider in order to identify students at risk for school exclusion. Regarding the test, accuracy to the on-line sentence comprehension task was significantly predicted by reading abilities and vocabulary skills, thus indicating that this test might represent a rapid but efficient way to assess linguistic abilities at school. We recommend that establishing a valid and practical procedure for the evaluation of linguistic skills in bilingual students who struggle with their L2 is the first step toward promoting social inclusion in the multilingual classroom, in order to increase their ability to actively participate in school and social activities.

We aim at determining whether 7-year-old Italian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI): (1) have problems with the production of wh- questions; (2) display a subject/object asymmetry in producing which- and who questions; (3) attempt to simplify questions, especially which- questions; (4) have difficulties with movement and verbal agreement in wh- questions. We elicited subject and object who and which NP questions in 10 children with SLI (M=7;2), in 10 chronological age (CA)-matched controls (M=7;2) and 10 language-matched controls (M=5;2). Results showed that (1) children with SLI produced fewer questions than both control groups; (2) a subject/object asymmetry was observed in who questions but not in which NP questions; (3) which NP questions were more problematic than who questions; (4) children with SLI produced more agreement errors and resorted to simplification strategies to avoid wh- question production. Results point to a grammatical deficit due to the computation of complex grammatical relations and suggest that there is a misalignment among pieces of linguistic competence needed to form Italian wh- questions (wh- movement and agreement computation). Outcomes have implications for clinical assessment recommending the production of wh- questions to be considered in the evaluation of SLI in Italian

The performance of 122 children on syntactic awareness of clitics and articles in French was examined. Three clinical groups (21 children with ASD, 22 children with SLI, 23 children with DD) and a group of 56 younger children with TD were studied. On the article task, children with ASD obtained lower scores than all the other groups and on the clitic task they performed worse than children with DD. In addition, children with ASD and low expressive language displayed more difficulty than children with SLI on the clitic task. Thus, a subgroup of children with ASD is taxed in an area that is critical to identify children with SLI