Listening narrative comprehension is a complex process that requires the processing of explicit (i.e., information presented in the text) and implicit information (i.e., information inferable from the text) and involves several linguistic and cognitive skills. However, the specific role of these skills in children's comprehension remains unclear.…

The present contribution aims at presenting an assessment tool (i.e., the TALK-assessment) built to evaluate the language development and school readiness of Italian preschoolers before they enter primary school, and its predictive validity for the children's reading and writing skills at the end of the first year of primary school. The early…

We investigated the predictive power of cognitive skills and background variables of 769 first and second grade children learning to read two orthographically different languages Finnish and German in three countries Finland, Germany and Italy. Main results from stepwise regression models showed that in all countries word reading at first grade…

The unit-decade compatibility effect is interpreted to reflect processes of place value integration in two-digit number magnitude comparisons. The current study aimed at elucidating the influence of language properties on the compatibility effect of Arabic two-digit numbers in Austrian, Italian, and Czech first graders. The number word systems of…

In the present study, the authors aimed to assess the short- and long-term predictive power of the various components of an emergent literacy model on early writing abilities in a language with a mainly transparent orthography (Italian). Emergent literacy skills were assessed in 72 children (M age = 5.05 years, SD = plus or minus 0.03) who were…

In this longitudinal study we analyse the early phases of reading development in Italian and explore the transition from phonological to lexical reading. A group of 28 Italian children was tested in four phases. Language and cognitive skills were first assessed in the preschool. Reading performance was then tested in three different sessions, in…