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…

We investigated online early comprehension in Italian children aged 12 and 20 months, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic features (i.e., gender) carried by determiners in facilitating comprehension and anticipating upcoming words. A naturalistic eye-tracking procedure was employed, recording looking behaviours during a classical…

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build…

Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…

This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al.,…

Deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) need a supportive family environment to facilitate language development. The present study was designed to assess the effects of parent training (PT) on enhancing children's communication development. The PT was based on the "It Takes Two to Talk" model, with specific adaptations for families of…

This paper will present the findings of a wide-scale research aimed at studying the phenomenon of Child Language Brokering (henceforth CLB) in Italy. After providing a description of recent immigration patterns and the provision of language services in Italy, and an overview of current research in this field, this study will discuss narrative data…

The present study examined continuity/discontinuity and stability/instability of noun and verb production measures in 30 child-mother dyads observed at 16 and 20 months, and predictive relations with the acquisition of nouns and verbs at 24 months. Children exhibited significant discontinuity and robust stability in the frequency of nouns and…