Handwriting is a useful skill through education, yet handwriting difficulties are common in students with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD), including Developmental Coordination Disorder. There are few practical tools to assess legibility, among these the Handwriting Legibility Scale (HLS) shows good reliability and validity for 9- to…

Empathy is important for interpersonal communication, social emotion, and social cognitive abilities throughout the lifespan. This study examined the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA) in a sample of 472 Italian children and early adolescents aged 8-13 years.…

Effective communication is a fundamental aspect of children's daily living, enabling interaction with adults and peers. A rich literature suggests that communicative abilities develop with age, while little is known about cross-cultural differences and similarities. This study presents a comparison of the communicative performance of Finnish (n =…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a specific register that adults use to address infants, and it is characterised by prosodic exaggeration and lexical and syntactic simplification. Several authors have underlined that this simplified speech becomes more complex according to the infant's age. However, there is a lack of studies on lexical and…

Background: Reading can be assessed using different materials, including non-words and texts. Unlike reading words or non-words, reading a text may be supported by reading comprehension, and the extent of this support could change with the amount of schooling. Aim: The present study aimed to examine how reading decoding in a shallow orthography…

Emoticons play a key role in digital written interactions. Since the 1980s research has highlighted their growing relevance, as they allow to convey increasingly rich emotional, social, and pragmatic information. This article contributes to this area of research by providing an analysis of emoticons as structural markers in Twitter interactions.…

Verbal working memory resources may impact syntax comprehension. Thirteen Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs) were assessed in relative clause (RC) comprehension, digit span and nonword repetition and compared to 13 chronological age peers (CA) and 13 younger controls (LA) with normal hearing (NH). The RC comprehension task tested…

The study was designed to investigate pragmatic development and the ability to make comments/questions on social and non-social topics in Italian-speaking children aged 18-47 months. Parents of 190 children completed an adaptation of the Language Use Inventory into Italian. Overall, the children's performance on the subscales of the LUI-Italian…

Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Italian and Canadian…

Specific language impairment (SLI) is a heterogeneous disorder affecting various aspects of language. While most studies have investigated impairments in the domain of syntax and morphosyntax, little is known about compositional semantics and the process of deriving pragmatic meanings in SLI. We selected a group of sixteen monolingual…

Age-related changes in divergent thinking and creative objects production were investigated in 150 native Italian speakers, divided into six age groups, each one comprised 25 participants: young (20-29), young adult (30-39), middle aged (40-49), adult-old (50-59), old (60-69), and old-old (70-80). Two tasks were used: the alternative uses task,…

Purpose: The Language Development Survey (LDS; Rescorla, 1989) was used to compare Italian and English lexical development. The authors addressed the issue of universal versus language-specific aspects of lexical development by testing language, age, and gender effects on vocabulary scores and by comparing vocabulary composition across languages.…

Italian has regular spelling-sound correspondences; however, assignment of lexical stress is unpredictable. Sensitivity to stress neighborhood information was investigated by constructing three types of three-syllabic nonwords: nonwords with word-endings characterized by a strong neighborhood of dominant stress words (dominant), nonwords with…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to obtain information to characterize potential trainees seeking training programs about organic farming in the form of mobile learning. This information is expected to allow for establishing a set of guidelines to design mobile training opportunities that could match the potential clients' wishes.…

The effects of warning on false recognition and associated subjective experience of false recollection and familiarity were investigated in 7-to 13-year-old children and young adults (N = 259) using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Two warning conditions (warning with an example of a critical lure and warning without an example of a…