While previous work on postverbal subjects in Italian has shown that young children are sensitive to the effects of argument structure and definiteness, little is known about the acquisition of postverbal subjects at the VP-periphery. In response, the present study investigated such subjects under new-information focus by monolingual Italian…

This study brings together two previously largely independent fields of multilingual language acquisition: heritage language and third language (L3) acquisition. We investigate the production of fortis and lenis stops in semi-naturalistic speech in the three languages of 20 heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with German as a majority language and…

The present study investigates whether exposure to multilingual pedagogies enhances emergent bilingual children's narrative abilities. These abilities are among the most reliable indicators of children's literacy skills. We compare two groups of emergent bilingual children with migrant background attending the fourth and fifth grade of a public…

This study compared individuals from two first language (L1) backgrounds (Italian, Mandarin) to determine how they may differ in their perception of Japanese consonant length (i.e. singleton vs. geminate) according to the phonemic status of length in L1 and experience with Japanese. The participants included two groups of non-native learners of…

It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualism interacts with dyslexia in a task measuring the subject's morphological abilities, to verify if the advantage typically found in bilingualism arises…

The present paper investigates the acquisition of L3 Polish by L1 Italian university students of L2 Russian. The participants had never studied the L3 prior to the experiment, but took a meta-linguistically explicit course in Slavic Linguistics focussing on Polish/Russian contrastive grammar. The main research question is whether or not the…

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as…

This study focuses on the assessment of working memory and linguistic skills in 21 Italian-Russian speaking bilingual children who were born in Italy and inherited Russian from their parents. Their performance was compared to that of 21 monolingual Russian-speaking and 21 monolingual Italian-speaking peers. For the assessment of the two languages…

The aim of this manuscript is to examine the perceived parental perfectionism in undergraduate Italian students. Study 1 aimed at exploring the factorial structure, reliability, and construct validity of the Italian version of the Family Almost Perfect Scale (FAPS). The aim of Study 2 was to cross-validate the FAPS structure with a different…

Italian relative clauses like "Il bambino che bacia la mamma" 'the child that kisses the mom' are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic…

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored language users' intuitions about three types of word combinations: free combinations, collocations, and idioms. In Study 1, Italian Verb+Noun…

In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the performance in a pluralization task of 52 Italian children divided into two groups: 24 children with developmental dyslexia (mean age 10.0 years old) and 28 typically developing children (mean age 9.11 years old). Our task, inspired by Berko's Wug…

The present study looks into the effects of early multilingual education by investigating linguistic knowledge and metalinguistic awareness in young learners at the primary level. The study aims to establish whether children in multilingual education programmes perform higher on a measure of metalinguistic awareness and with regards to their L1…

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in adolescents is understudied in Italy. This study evaluated the Italian Obsessive Compulsive Inventory--Child Version (OCI-CV) and its predictive validity on OCD symptoms at 1-year-follow-up, an aspect that was not investigated by previous international research. Use of OCI-CV in schools might enhance early…

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…