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…

A remarkable example of Spanish-Italian contact is the Spanish variety spoken in Buenos Aires (Porteño), which is said to be prosodically "Italianized" due to migration-induced contact. The change in Porteño prosody has been interpreted as a result of transfer from the first language (L1) that occurred when Italian immigrants learned…

Our native tongue influences the way we perceive other languages. But does it also determine the way we perceive nonlinguistic sounds? The authors investigated how speakers of Italian, Turkish, and Persian group sequences of syllables, tones, or visual shapes alternating in either frequency or duration. We found strong native listening effects…

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…

A large body of empirical research demonstrates that people exploit a wide variety of cues for the segmentation of continuous speech in artificial languages, including rhythmic properties, phrase boundary cues, and statistical regularities. However, less is known regarding how the different cues interact. In this study we addressed the question of…

Purpose: The principal aims of this study were to detect phonetic measures (consonant inventory, intelligibility, frequency, and types of phonological errors) associated with lexical and morphosyntactic ability and to analyze the types of phonological processes in children with different language skills. Method: The sample was composed of 30…

This study analysed the early linguistic development of Italian pre-term children. Samples of spontaneous pre-linguistic and verbal production were recorded at 12 and 18 months of age from two groups of children: 24 pre-term children and 15 full-term children. The Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates Questionnaire was administered at 24 months…

Two cross-modal priming experiments tested whether lexical access is constrained by syllabic structure in Italian. Results extend the available Italian data on the processing of stressed syllables showing that syllabic information restricts the set of candidates to those structurally consistent with the intended word (Experiment 1). Lexical…

Italian polysyllabic words with stress falling on the last syllable are written with a diacritic sign on the last vowel. It allows discrimination between two words with the same orthographic segments (e.g., papa [pope], papa [dad]). The effect of the accent mark in left neglect dyslexia has never been investigated. In the current study, six…

Current opinion regarding the nature of the young child's representation of two or more languages is that there is one system during the earliest stages of development. This paper explores theoretical and methodological difficulties underlying this issue. Theoretically, it is questioned what is being claimed about the child's cognitive capacities…

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)

Analysis of the distributional properties of non-syllabic vowels within word boundaries in Italian demonstrates: the role of phonological constraints on the distribution of non-syllabic words; the syllabification possibilities within each type of sequence by setting up a structural model; and the phonemic occurrences in vowel sequences collected…

Traditional descriptions of Italian phonology have occasionally suggested that some type of connection exists between "raddoppiamento sintattico" (RS) and the word internal consonant length contrast. (RS is defined as a systematic lengthening of the first consonant of the second word in a two-word sequence in certain syntactic and phonological…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether individual differences observed in the grammatical morphology of children with specific language impairment (SLI) could be traced to another source, such as the use of weak syllables. Results show that imitations in prosody may restrict the degree of grammatical morpheme use by children with SLI.…