Infants learning languages with long consonants, or geminates, have been found to "overselect" and "overproduce" these consonants in early words and also to commonly omit the word-initial consonant. A production study with thirty Italian children recorded at 1;3 and 1;9 strongly confirmed both of these tendencies. To test the…

This study assesses the extent of phonetic continuity between babble and words in four Italian children followed longitudinally from 0;9 or 0;10 to 2;0--two with relatively rapid and two with slower lexical growth. Prelinguistic phonetic characteristics, including both (a) consistent use of specific consonants and (b) age of onset and extent of…

The aims of this study were to investigate whether specific linguistic difficulties in preterm children persist at eight years and to examine the interrelationships between language and literacy in this population, compared with a control group of full-term children. Sixty-eight monolingual Italian preterms and 26 chronologically matched controls…