In English, a sentence like "The cat didn't eat the carrot or the pepper" typically receives a "neither" interpretation; in Japanese it receives a "not this or not that" interpretation. These two interpretations are in a subset/superset relation, such that the "neither" interpretation (strong reading)…

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…

We conducted a multisite replication of Yang and Lyster's (2010) study investigating the effects of recasts and prompts on learning English regular and irregular past tense. Our study was conducted with intact high school and vocational school classes in Italy and Bosnia. Our participants were young adolescents (14-15 and 16-17 years old), a…

One of the most intriguing questions in the investigation of second-language acquisition concerns the role of learners' first language (L1). Comparing learners of different backgrounds (L1 German vs. L1 Romance languages), we aim to explore the acquisition of tense and aspect features in Spanish as a second language (L2). Findings show that the L1…

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…

Negative sentences with epistemic modals (e.g., John "might" not come/John "can" not come) contain two logical operators, negation and the modal, which yields a potential semantic ambiguity depending on scope assignment. The two possible readings are in a subset/superset relation, such that the strong reading ("can…

Background: In many languages a weakness in non-word repetition serves as a useful clinical marker of specific language impairment (SLI) in children. However, recent work in Italian has shown that the repetition of real words may also have clinical utility. For young typically developing Italian children, real word repetition is more predictive of…

The Aspect Hypothesis assumes that--in early interlanguages--the perfective past spreads from telic to atelic verbs because events occurring in the past are easier to be associated with predicates having an inherent endpoint in their lexico-conceptual representation. In this study it is questioned whether for initial L2ers knowing the general…

The study explored the different influences of roots and suffixes in reading aloud morphemic pseudowords (e.g., vetr-ezza, "glass-ness"). Previous work on adults showed a facilitating effect of both roots and suffixes on naming times. In the present study, pseudoword stimuli including roots and suffixes in different combinations were…

Much of the research regarding the effectiveness of drama as a teaching tool is evaluated using qualitative analysis. This collaborative action study applied quantitative research techniques to assess the usefulness of drama as a teaching tool. The aim was to discover what happens to children's understanding of verb tense when taught using drama…

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers…

This study aims to describe in detail the linguistic skills of a large group of SLI participants. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of age-related effects on their linguistic performance and to whether a linguistic assessment of a narrative task can capture language impairments that might not be adequately pointed out by standardized…

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.…

This article reports on an investigation into the loss of morphology expressing temporality in the Italian of second generation Italo-Australians. The purpose of the study is to verify whether the loss of Italian tense and aspect morphology proceeds from marked to unmarked, where markedness is defined on the basis of formal and semantic criteria.…

Twenty-five Italian-speaking children (ages 4 to 7) with specific language impairments were compared to younger control children in their use of auxiliary verbs, pronominal clitics, infinitives, present-tense verbal inflections, and articles. Differences favoring the control children were found for those morphemes that required the production of…