In the current study, we investigated the role of vocabulary knowledge in the relation between working memory (WM) and reading comprehension, in a sample of 55 typically developing 8-year-old Italian children. The role of WM in comprehension is well-established, as both involve similar processes for successful task performance (i.e., active…

Environmental sources of variance in the Italian vocabulary and reading skills of bilingual primary school children from immigrant families (or language minority bilingual children (LMBC)) in Italy were investigated, and the LMBC's skill levels were compared to those of their monolingual classmates. A total of 140 children from the first, third,…

This study focuses on the assessment of working memory and linguistic skills in 21 Italian-Russian speaking bilingual children who were born in Italy and inherited Russian from their parents. Their performance was compared to that of 21 monolingual Russian-speaking and 21 monolingual Italian-speaking peers. For the assessment of the two languages…

One of the consequences of the growing number of English-taught programmes offered by European universities is the top-down request that lecturers switch from their L1 to English, for teaching, while the administrative staff is required to communicate with international students. To help the academic staff cope with the change, some universities…

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored language users' intuitions about three types of word combinations: free combinations, collocations, and idioms. In Study 1, Italian Verb+Noun…

It had been hypothesized that, in developmental dyslexia (DD), an implicit learning deficit explains children's problems in encoding the phoneme-grapheme correspondences underlying the writing system and thus the development of spelling skills. The present study tested the efficacy of an intervention to facilitate implicit learning of…

Previous studies with English-speaking children showed that handwriting and spelling abilities played a critical role in the development of writing fluency and quality, particularly during the transition from the kindergarten to primary school; in contrast, studies dealing with orthographically transparent languages found small or no relations…

This study analyzed the potential transfer effects on reading comprehension skills of two different training programs administered to 9- to 10-year-old children attending fourth grade classes. One training program was based on a working memory updating paradigm (i.e., words, digits, sentence and text updating working memory tasks). The other…