In this article, the author presents the memoir of Angelo Patri, a very important and well-known educational figure during the first of the last century in his educational career. In 1917 Patri published Schoolmaster of the Great City, which gives readers vivid impressions of his early life in Italy and New York, his family and community, his…

This paper analyses the language practices of a teacher in an Italian bilingual class. The children were learning Italian in Year One of elementary school. The teacher consistently spoke Italian with the children. The description of the teacher's talk shows how she used Italian for classroom management, for instructions, for teaching subject…

Background: The discovery of clinical markers for specific language impairment (SLI) in children can assist in the accurate identification of children with this disorder, and in a description of the disorder's phenotype for genetic study. One challenge to this type of research is the fact that languages vary in the most salient symptoms of SLI.…

The study investigates the relationship between input, UG (Universal Grammar) parameter values, and the native language in the acquisition of a purely semantic property that is superficially unrelated to its syntactic trigger, The Bare Noun/Proper Name parameter (Longobardi, 1991; 1994; 1996; 2001; 2005). On the one hand, English and Italian bare…

This study explored comprehension monitoring, use of reading strategies and reading comprehension of bilingual students at different levels of perceived proficiency in Italian. The participants were bilingual fifth to eighth-grade elementary school students from four Italian schools in Rijeka, Croatia. Students' reading comprehension was assessed.…

The authors studied how care provision and educational and therapeutic support for children with profound multiple disabilities are organized and coordinated in the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland. Study questions were: (a) how do the care and educational elements of support coexist in the everyday life of these…

An investigation was conducted by students in a linguistics seminar which had two parts, a matched-guise questionnaire and a semantic differential questionnaire. The content and results of the latter are presented here. The objective of this part of the study was to determine what attitudes French-speaking Swiss students had toward languages they…

Proposes a model of ethnic behavior that describes group behavior as constrained by the following aspects of social structure: demographic opportunity, economic opportunity, and cultural heritage. Tests the model by comparing the single ancestry rates of the following ethnic groups: Italian, Polish, Slovak, and Hungarian. (Author/BJV)

Comparison of Italian and English-speaking children's (N=200) segmentation abilities indicated that the discrepancies between the language groups reflected the children's phonologic and orthographic differences. (CB)

Offers a sampling of results achieved by Relational Grammar in exposing "hidden rules" behind various facts of Italian, major conspicuous facts as well as tiny arcane ones. (CB)

Reports on research investigating nonreciprocity of address to female teachers in secondary schools in Catania, Sicily, where male teachers were always addressed with their academic, professional titles (which have great, overt prestige in southern Italy) and women were frequently addressed as "signora" or "signorina" in the…

The insularity of Italian Americans is evident in their relationship with the Catholic church in America. By insisting on remaining Catholic, but only on their own terms, the Italians have won no support either from other Catholics, the church hierarchy, or the Protestants who hoped to convert them to Protestantism. (Author/MJL)

Studied kinship in Italian-American families with an emphasis on the sibling relationship. Focused interviews were conducted with 74 Italian-American homogeneous marriages, 98 inter-marriages, and 56 Protestants of European background. Found intermarried families more involved in kinship activities with the greatest differences between groups…

Presents data about two St. Louis neighborhoods, one Italian and one Black, to support the theory that forces in the larger society (such as social discrimination and the availability of housing and jobs) are critical determinants of ethnic solidarity or dispersion over time. (MK)

Reports on research on the acquisition of adjectives vs inflectional endings in Italian children. Patterns resulting from a longitudinal study involving two children and an experiment involving 84 children are compared to patterns of adults participating in the latter experiment. (Author/AM)