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The increasing number of primary students with varying degrees of exposure to a family minority language requires a reflection on whether specific aspects of their daily language experience influence their learning. Indeed, Minority Language Children (MLC) often report difficulties in reading that must be better investigated to exclude neurodevelopmental conditions such as developmental dyslexia. To this aim, we developed a new instrument, the Daily Linguistic Practice Interview. It allows for collecting 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 these linguistic aspects and reading skills was investigated on 79 MLC aged 8 to 11 y.o.through a correlational approach and regression models. Our results show that family and extra-family language use influence accurate lexical recognition, moreover a “mother effect” broadly affects reading skills in the majority language. Our findings suggest that MLC deserve a more careful evaluation of learning disorders with ad hoc standardized tests, that incorporates information about the family language exposure.

In this study, we validated the "ReadFree tool", a computerised battery of 12 visual and auditory tasks developed to identify poor readers also in minority-language children (MLC). We tested the task-specific discriminant power on 142 Italian-monolingual participants (8-13 years old) divided into monolingual poor readers (N = 37) and good readers (N = 105) according to standardised Italian reading tests. The performances at the discriminant tasks of the "ReadFree tool" were entered into a classification and regression tree (CART) model to identify monolingual poor and good readers. The set of classification rules extracted from the CART model were applied to the MLC's performance and the ensuing classification was compared to the one based on standardised Italian reading tests. According to the CART model, auditory go-no/go (regular), RAN and Entrainment(100bpm) were the most discriminant tasks. When compared with the clinical classification, the CART model accuracy was 86% for the monolinguals and 76% for the MLC. Executive functions and timing skills turned out to have a relevant role in reading. Results of the CART model on MLC support the idea that ad hoc standardised tasks that go beyond reading are needed.

The current exploratory study aimed to offer a description of the learning skills and well-being of multilingual adolescents with Italian as L2, a population regarded as vulnerable with respect to their academic achievements and psychosocial profile. We compared the performance of L2 participants with that of their monolingual peers with and without Specific Learning Disorders on a range of tests and questionnaires to define their learning skills and well-being within the school context. Results confirm greater reading difficulties in the L2 group compared to monolingual peers with Specific Learning Disorders. This pilot study offers one of the first investigations into the learning skills and well-being of a scarcely studied population, namely L2 adolescents. Additionally, it discusses practices that can be implemented within the classroom to promote inclusion.

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) is considered a universal marker of developmental dyslexia (DD) and could also be helpful to identify a reading deficit in minority-language children (MLC), in which it may be hard to disentangle whether the reading difficulties are due to a learning disorder or a lower proficiency in the language of instruction. We tested reading and rapid naming skills in monolingual Good Readers (mGR), monolingual Poor Readers (mPR), and MLC, by using our new version of RAN, the RAN-Shapes, in 127 primary school students (from 3rd to 5th grade). In line with previous research, MLC showed, on average, lower reading performances as compared to mGR. However, the two groups performed similarly to the RAN-Shapes task. On the contrary, the mPR group underperformed both in the reading and the RAN tasks. Our findings suggest that reading difficulties and RAN performance can be dissociated in MLC; consequently, the performance at the RAN-Shapes may contribute to the identification of children at risk of a reading disorder without introducing any linguistic bias, when testing MLC.

Reading and writing skills influence the social status of students, exerting effects not only on learning, but also on wellbeing. This study aimed to assess the impact of diagnosis of specific learning disorder on well-being in secondary-school students, comparing students with a diagnosis of specific learning disorder (SLD-group), students showing learning difficulties without diagnosis (LD-group) and students without learning difficulties (control-group). Students were tested with neuropsychological screening tests in order to identify learning difficulties and were further assessed by means of psychological and school well-being questionnaires. The results show that LD group perceive themselves as having a low sense of mastery and autonomy, less interest and engagement in daily activities and low peer social support than their schoolmates. This result highlights, for the LD group, a low well-being experience, which is not observed in the SLD and control groups. On the contrary, SLD group students do not differ from control group students in any dimensions except for the perceived parents’ support and involvement in school life, in which the SLD group show the highest scores. This work underlines the importance of having a diagnosis as it seems to work as a protective factor for both the psychological and school well-being of the student.

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.

The Research Topic collects contributions that allow to rethink educational goals in the digital era from new angles of exploration. Moving from the assumption that introducing innovative technology paradigms in education requires unravelling aspects related to the impact of digital technologies on students’ well-being, teaching efficacy and learning success, the Research Topic addressed these points by proposing novel tools and didactic methodologies to be implemented in the educational practices. These aspects appear even more relevant after the pandemic breakout that forced the educational systems of most countries of the world to rely on digital education mainly.

Subject and object relative clauses have been studied from the point of view of language acquisition and adult sentence processing. In the adult sentence processing literature, subject relative clauses (RCs) are read faster than object RCs (e.g., Frauenfelder et al. 1980 for French; King and Kutas 1995 for English; Schriefers et al. 1995 for Dutch). Similarly, children understand and produce subject RCs earlier and with greater accuracy than object RCs in a variety of languages with head-initial relative clauses, as English, Hebrew and Italian. These findings cannot be a coincidence but reflect the fact that what children acquire first is also easier to process by adults. In this article, we support this observation by investigating subject and object RCs in children and adults speaking French and Italian. These languages display subject and object relatives as in (1), but they also have a type of object relative in which the subject is postverbal. We replicate the observation that subject relatives are easier than object and show that object relatives as in (1b), with the embedded subject in preverbal position are easier than those with the embedded subject in postverbal position, both for children and adults. We offer an account of these findings in terms of Fodor and Inoue’s (2000) diagnosis model in light of the fact that acquisition involves processing.

The aim of this work is to investigate the factors promoting students’ engagement at school and supporting their well-being experience. According to the Positive Education there is a strong relationship between school environment and student’s well-being. Moreover, the quality of the school climate perceived by the students was found to influence engagement in school activities, as well. In this study, 153 students (M = 67) attending 10th grade were presented with tests and questionnaires to assess individual assets (personality traits, literacy skills), emerging appraisals (school-climate, well-being experience) and emerging actions (school engagement), according to the Student Well-Being Model. Path analysis showed that the best model does include neither individual assets nor direct effect of school climate on engagement, as the effect of school climate on engagement is mediated by well-being experience. The main result is that school climate has been confirmed as an important factor to be considered to improve engagement in school activities, but it is effective only when its influence can modify the well-being experience of the students. Moreover, the lack of significant effects of individual assets in the model suggests that improving school climate means to support well-being experience and, indirectly school engagement, irrespective to learning abilities and personality traits. This work encourages working in/with schools to implement positive education programs that support and sustain a positive school climate and culture for school-community wellbeing.

ORCA.IT, a new online test of online research and comprehension was developed for the Italian population. A group of 183 students attending various types of upper secondary schools in Northern Italy were tested with the new tool and underwent further cognitive and neuropsychological assessment. The different school types involved in the study are representative of the school population in the Italian system, but can also be easily compared with the educational systems of other countries. The new test turned out to have good psychometric properties after accurate item construction and final selection. In particular, Version 1 showed better characteristics than Version 2. Subsequently, comparison with one-way ANOVAs were performed to test whether differences exist between different school types, between groups with and without reading difficulties, and between males and females. Such differences are sometimes reported in the literature, but many remain controversial. Further, Pearson's bivariate correlations were calculated to analyze associations between scores on the ORCA.IT and cognitive/neuropsychological variables. Finally, a stepwise regression analysis was performed on aggregated scores to identify the predictors of performance on each of the two versions. The test, especially in the most complete version (Version 1), appears to accurately and reliably capture students' web searching abilities and online reading comprehension. The tool could highlight differences in online search and comprehension ability between students with and without reading difficulties, not penalizing overall performance but allowing very specific weaknesses to be pointed out. Further, it seems to be able to capture differences due to both educational pathways (different school types) and social attitudes (differences between males and females). Most interestingly, it shows to be clearly resting on specific cognitive and neuropsychological abilities, including language, memory, and atten

In this study, we examined the contribution of morphological awareness to reading competence in a group of Italian L1 and Arabic-Italian early L2 children, i.e., exposed to Italian before 3 years of age. Children from first to fifth grade (age range: 6-11 years old) were tested on a range of morphological awareness and lexical tasks. Reading ability was tested through standardized tests of reading fluency and comprehension. Results showed that L1 children outperformed L2 on every measure of morphological awareness, as well as on reading tests. Regression analyses revealed that morphological awareness contributed to a different extent to reading ability across groups. Accuracy in the morphological awareness tasks was a significant predictor of word (and non-word) reading fluency in L1 and L2 first and second graders, while only in L1 third to fifth graders, response times and accuracy to a morphological awareness task explained a unique amount of variance in reading comprehension. Our results highlight the critical role of morphological processing in reading efficiency and suggest that a training inspired by morphological awareness may improve reading skills also in bilingual students.

This paper tested an assumption of the gradient model of split intransitivity put forward by Sorace (“Split Intransitivity Hierarchy” (SIH), 2000, 2004), namely that agentivity is a fundamental feature for unergatives but not for unaccusatives. According to this hypothesis, the animacy of the verb’s argument should affect the processing of unergative verbs to a greater extent than unaccusative verbs. By using eye-tracking methodology we monitored the online processing and integration costs of the animacy of the verb’s argument in intransitive verbs. We observed that inanimate subjects caused longer reading times only for unergative verbs, whereas the animacy of the verb’s argument did not influence the pattern of results for unaccusatives. In addition, the unergative verb data directly support the existence of gradient effects on the processing of the subject argument.

Although much research has been concerned with the development of kinematic aspects of handwriting, little is known about the development along with age of two principles that govern its rhythmic organization: Homothety and Isochrony. Homothety states that the ratio between the durations of the single motor events composing a motor act remains invariant and independent from the total duration of the movement. Isochrony refers to the proportional relationship between the speed of movement execution and the length of its trajectory. The current study shows that children comply with both principles since their first grade of primary school. The precocious adherence to these principles suggests that an internal representation of the rhythm of handwriting is available before the age in which handwriting is performed automatically. Overall, these findings suggest that despite being a cultural acquisition, handwriting appears to be shaped by more general constraints on the timing planning of the movements.

The cortical and subcortical neural correlates underlying item and order information in verbal short-term memory (STM) were investigated by means of digit span in 29 patients with direct electrical stimulation during awake surgery for removal of a neoplastic lesion. Stimulation of left Broca's area interfered with span, producing significantly more item than order errors, as compared to the stimulation of the supramarginal/angular gyrus, which also interfered with span but, conversely, produced more order than item errors. Similarly, stimulation of the third segment of the left superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF-III), also known as anterior segment of the arcuate fascicle (AF), produced more order than item errors. Therefore, we obtained two crucial results: first, we were able to distinguish between content and order information storage. Second, we demonstrated that the SLF-III is involved in transferring order information from Geschwind's area to Broca's area. In a few patients, we demonstrated that also order information of nonverbal material was disrupted by left supramarginal gyrus stimulation. Order information is thus likely stored in the supramarginal gyrus, possibly independently from the nature of the material. Hum Brain Mapp 38:3011–3024, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

In this study, we investigate whether co-referential processing across sentence boundaries is driven by universal properties of the general architecture of memory systems and whether cross-linguistic differences concerning the number of anaphoric forms available in a language’s referential inventory can impact the process of inter-sentential co-reference resolution. As a window into these questions, we test whether the repeated-name penalty (RNP) and the overt-pronoun penalty (OPP)—comprehension delays associated with repeated names and overt pronouns, respectively, in comparison to more reduced anaphoric forms in reference to salient antecedents—occur in Italian, examining the extent to which Italian resembles other null-subject languages, with focus on Spanish. Our self-paced reading experiment with factors Antecedent (Subject, Object) and Anaphor (Null Pronoun, Overt Pronoun, Repeated Name) found that Italian exhibits both an OPP and a (weaker) RNP, extending previous research that showed these effects in Spanish and strengthening the claim that co-reference resolution might be subject to universal principles.

Two experiments and a corpus study tested whether Brazilian Portuguese (BP), which has been argued to be shifting from null subjects toward overt subjects indeed shows a comprehension preference for reduced over fuller anaphors for salient antecedents, and whether comprehension is better explained as an imbalance between processing cost and discourse function (pragmatics account), or simply the frequency of different constructions (usage-based account). Sentences with overt pronouns were read slower (Experiment 1) but rated more acceptable (Experiment 2) than sentences with null pronouns when the antecedents were salient. Sentences with repeated names showed weaker effects than overt pronouns. The corpus analysis confirmed that BP is changing, but that null subjects are not yet infrequent, especially in academic writings. We argue that these results reflect a "pronoun avoidance strategy" in BP related to its transitory state, and propose a new view that integrates elements from both the pragmatics and usage-based accounts.

Learners of most languages are faced with the task of acquiring words to talk about number and quantity. Much is known about the order of acquisition of number words as well as the cognitive and perceptual systems and cultural practices that shape it. Substantially less is known about the acquisition of quantifiers. Here, we consider the extent to which systems and practices that support number word acquisition can be applied to quantifier acquisition and conclude that the two domains are largely distinct in this respect. Consequently, we hypothesize that the acquisition of quantifiers is constrained by a set of factors related to each quantifier's specific meaning. We investigate competence with the expressions for "all," "none," "some," "some not," and "most" in 31 languages, representing 11 language types, by testing 768 5-y-old children and 536 adults. We found a cross-linguistically similar order of acquisition of quantifiers, explicable in terms of four factors relating to their meaning and use. In addition, exploratory analyses reveal that languageand learner-specific factors, such as negative concord and gender, are significant predictors of variation.

Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies yielded controversial results concerning the specific role of the insula in recognizing the facial expression of disgust. To verify whether the insula has a selective role in facial disgust processing, emotion recognition was studied in thirteen patients during intraoperative stimulation of the insula in awake surgery performed for removal of a glioma close to this structure. Direct electrical stimulation of the left insula produced a general decrease in emotion recognition but only in the case of disgust there was a statistically significant detrimental effect (p=0.004). Happiness and anger were the best and the worst recognized emotion, respectively. The worst baseline performance with anger and, partly, fear could be explained with the involvement of the left temporal regions, striatum, and the connection between the striatum and the frontal lobe, as suggested in previous studies. Therefore, upon these intra-operative evidences, we argue for a selective role of the left insula in disgust recognition, although a (non significant) decrease in the recognition of other negative emotions was found. However, additional networks can develop, as demonstrated by the fact that disgust recognition was not impaired after surgery even in patients with insular resection in the current as in previous studies.

Relative clauses are not adjuncts: an experimental investigation of a corollary of the raising analyses. M. Vernice*, C. Cecchetto*, C. Donati^, V. Moscati° *University of Milan-Bicocca, ^Labex EFL/University Paris Diderot, °University of Siena ABSTRACT Relative clauses and more generally clauses modifying nouns have been at the center of a long debate in the last forty years, opposing largely diverging syntactic analyses, comparing relevant data and discussing perspectives. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this debate by adding novel experimental data on how these structures are processed in an online reading task. Two eye-tracking experiments were designed to investigate the temporal structural ambiguity that can arise between object relative clauses (object RCs

This study examines the comprehension of relative clauses by Chinese-speaking children, and evaluates the validity of the predictions of the Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 1998, 2000) and the Relativized Minimality approach (Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi, 2009). One hundred and twenty children from three to eight years of age were tested by using a character-sentence matching task. We found a preference for subject relative clauses that persists as children grow older. This preference is predicted by the Relativized Minimality approach, but not by the Dependency Locality Theory. In addition, we observed a fine-grained class of errors in comprehension. We discuss it in the light of the head-final status of Chinese relative clauses.

Several neuroimaging studies point to a key role of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) in the formation of socially relevant impressions. In 3 different experiments, participants were required to form socially relevant impressions about other individuals on the basis of text descriptions of their social behaviors, and to decide whether a face alone, a trait adjective (e.g., "selfish"), or a face presented with a trait adjective was consistent or inconsistent with the impression they had formed. Before deciding whether the target stimulus matched the impression they had previously formed, participants received transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the dmPFC, the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG, also implicated in social impression formation), or over a control site (vertex). Results from the 3 experiments converged in showing that interfering with dmPFC activity significantly delayed participants in responding whether a face-adjective pair was consistent with the impression they had formed. No effects of TMS were observed following stimulation of the IFG or when evaluations had to be made on faces or trait adjectives presented alone. Our findings critically extend previous neuroimaging evidence by indicating a causal role of the dmPFC in creating coherent impressions based on the integration of face and verbal description of social behaviors.

Learning people's names is a challenging task for most individuals and becomes increasingly difficult with age. In the current study, we investigated the role of the fronto-temporal network in this task by applying tDCS over the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) and the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) during unfamiliar face-name association learning. Proper name retrieval was tested with a face naming and a face-name association task. In Experiment 1, we found that real anodal tDCS over the left ATL decreased naming accuracy compared to sham stimulation because participants produced significantly more intrusions. The stimulation may have increased interference among arising competitors when retrieving the correct name associated to the presented face, as indicated by the longer response latencies in the association task after real tDCS. In Experiment 2, cathodal tDCS applied over the left ATL did not affect the participants' performance in the same tasks, ruling out a possible effect of discomfort or stimulation side effects. In Experiment 3, anodal tDCS over the left IFG led to a significant decrease in intrusions compared to sham stimulation, possibly improving a selection mechanism. Our results confirm the role of the left ATL and the IFG in the retrieval of proper names, and demonstrate the importance of their functional interaction in processing proper names.

In two sentence repetition experiments, we investigated whether four-and five-year-olds master distinct representations for intransitive verb classes by testing two syntactic analyses of unaccusatives (Burzio, 1986; Belletti, 1988). Under the assumption that, with unaccusatives, the partitive case of the postverbal argument is realized only on indefinites (Belletti, 1988), we tested whether children used indefiniteness as a feature to assign the partitive case to the verb's argument. In the sentences, we manipulated whether the subject preceded or followed the (unaccusative or unergative) verb and whether the subject was expressed by means of a definite or indefinite NP. With unaccusatives, children tended to place the subject in the postverbal position when the subject NP was indefinite, whereas, when the sentence presented a definite postverbal subject, children preferred to place the definite subject in the preverbal position. Definiteness exerted an effect only with unaccusatives, suggesting that children treated unergatives and unaccusatives differently.