We investigate the production of subject and object "who"- and "which"-questions in the Italian of 4- to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that…

This study investigated the role of typological relatedness, language of the community, and age, in predicting similarities and differences between English-Italian, Spanish-Italian bilingual children and their monolingual child and adult counterparts in the acceptability of pre- and postverbal object pronouns in [[plus or minus]focus] contexts in…

A previous study reported that, similar to young and adult skilled readers, Italian developmental dyslexics read pseudowords made up of a root and a derivational suffix faster and more accurately than simple pseudowords. Unlike skilled readers, only dyslexic and reading-matched younger children benefited from morphological structure in reading…

This study explores the possibility of cross-language activation when bilinguals process number words in their first language (Italian) and their second language (German). Italian monolinguals (Experiment 1), German monolinguals (Experiment 2), and Italian/German bilinguals (Experiment 3) were required to decide the larger of two number words…

This study provides new evidence concerning the pattern of acquisition of free and bound morphemes in Italian, based on the speech of 59 children recorded through a cross-sectional method. We found that inflectional morphology is mastered before free-standing morphology. Despite the great variety of verb inflections, the analyses showed that…

This study aimed to investigate cognate/noncognate processing distinctions in young adult bilinguals and examined whether the previously reported cognate facilitation effect would also be demonstrated in older adult bilinguals. Two groups of Italian-English bilingual participants performed lexical decisions in repetition priming experiments.…

Two experiments tested the activation of gender stereotypes for Italian role nouns (e.g., "teacher"). The experimental paradigm was modeled on the one proposed by a study by Banaji and Hardin: participants were shown a prime word followed by a target pronoun ("he" or "she") on which they performed a gender decision task. The prime words were…

Evaluates the contribution of visuo-gestural modality versus linguistic factors in determining the order of elements in sign language. The results of a study show that Italian Sign Language differs along significant lines from both spoken Italian and pantomime. (22 references) (GLR)

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)

Canadian English-Italian bilingual children were administered phonological, reading, spelling, syntactic, and working memory tasks in both languages. Results suggest English-Italian interdependence is most clearly related to phonological processing but may influence other linguistic modules. Exposure to a language with more predictable…

Examined whether second language (L2) utterance durations increase as age of learning increases. Fluently produced English sentences spoken by 240 native speakers of both Italian and Korean were examined. Results give preliminary support for the proposal that the more established the first language during exposure to the second language, the more…

Analysis of the spontaneous speech of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced Italian subjects' tendency to use articles. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the language groups. (Author/CB)

Investigates the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragamatics from the perspectives of functional constraints on sentence processing. Findings reveal that native speakers of Italian first become aware of the importance of the concept of word order in a second language before being able to determine the specifics of word order in that…

Used two methods to assess bilingual dominance in four groups of Italian-English bilinguals. Ratios were derived from bilinguals' self-rating of ability to speak and understand Italian compared to English. Dominance in Italian was associated with a relatively high level of performance in Italian (assessed in a translation task) and relatively poor…

Explores role of discourse functions in children's use of "because" ("perche" in Italian). Disputes of 172 preschoolers were analyzed in terms of interactive move, argumentative strategies, and communicative acts. Results showed causal connective tends to co-occur with justification acts and may work as device introducing new information and…