It is known that in American Sign Language (ASL) span is shorter than in English, but this discrepancy has never been systematically investigated using other pairs of signed and spoken languages. This finding is at odds with results showing that short-term memory (STM) for signs has an internal organization similar to STM for words. Moreover, some…

Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). "A first language: The early stages", Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult…

This is the first study that reports the lexicality effect (i.e., words read better than nonwords) in Italian with fully transparent and methodologically well-controlled stimuli. We investigated how words and nonwords are read aloud in the Italian transparent orthography, in which there is an almost strict one-to-one correspondence between…

The prevalence of phonological and surface dyslexia subtypes among Swedish university students with dyslexia (n = 40) was examined using both the regression method, developed by Castles and Coltheart, and latent profile analysis. When an academic-level control group was used as a reference group in a regression, eight students with phonological…

This paper considers the design and development of CALL materials with the aim of achieving an optimal mix between in-class and out-of-class learning in the context of teaching Italian at an Australian university. The authors discuss three projects in relation to the following themes: (a) conceptions of the in-class/out-of-class relationship, (b)…

This work studies verbal conflict between parents and preadolescents through analysis of family dinnertime conversations. We move from the assumption that verbal conflict is an educational instrument of interaction and a tool of socialization. The aim of the research is to analyze the participants' strategies in situations of conflict and to…

This article seeks to explore how various language policies may have impacted Year 12 language candidature in Victoria. Australian Federal and Victorian State Government language policies are but one of the influences yet, it may be argued, the most significant influence. These stand alongside waves of immigration, global events and conflicts, and…

This article seeks to assess the impact of V-Pal (Virtual Partnerships for All Languages) on the student language learning experience within a conventional UK higher education (HE) curriculum. V-Pal is an innovative computer-mediated language scheme, based on a reciprocal, distance-learning language project, run by the University of Manchester in…

A team of university Italian teachers at an Australian university has been able to obtain enduring benefits from computer-assisted language learning (CALL), through projects that last, and indeed grow and develop over time. The projects have focused on supporting students in effective use of out-of-class time once they reach an intermediate level…

This paper presents an analysis of the pragmatic use of concessive constructions in business letter discourse. In linguistics concession has been analyzed primarily within concessive clauses which have been widely studied, either alone or compared with other syntactic categories such as adversative, causal or conditional clauses. The term…

Recent neurophysiological and brain imaging studies have shown that the motor system is involved in language processing. However, it is an open question whether this involvement is a necessary requisite to understand language or rather a side effect of distinct cognitive processes underlying it. In order to clarify this issue we carried out three…

This study investigates Italian and French students' grammatical problems while reading in German as an L3 or L4. For the study, we developed a reading test which consists of invented encyclopaedia articles on imaginary animals. These articles enabled us to test various grammatical structures for their receptive difficulty. This paper discusses…

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers…

The progressive spread of English as the main language of international scientific communication has been interpreted in many different ways by several scholars. The paper presents a brief review of the scientific debate on such topics, focusing on the main stereotypes which have been created in order to provide explanations for the development of…

This dissertation project examines the language contact situation of Chipilo, a Veneto-Spanish bilingual community of immigrant origin in central Mexico, focusing both on the social motivations for the sustained bilingualism observed and the linguistic outcomes in the Spanish of the community. Chipilo is a unique community in that Veneto, a…