From 1890-1914, Argentina received a large influx of Italian immigrants who wanted to "hacer la América," or live the American dream of economic prosperity. With Italian immigrants representing nearly half of all immigrants entering Argentina, the government strived to create a new sense of Argentine pride and nationalism. The objective…

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is an instrument developed by Goodman for screening child and adolescent psychopathology. The aim of this study is to contribute to the analysis and validation of the internal structure of the Italian SDQ teacher version (SDQ-T). The SDQ-T was completed by 301 teachers, evaluating 3,302 children…

This article tells the story of a child immigrant's L2 acquisition process. The narrative demonstrates the effects of social and academic factors on motivation to acquire an L2 and the result of immigration at a young age on cultural identity formation. The article begins by discussing the need for research into sociocultural factors in the second…

In the present study, the authors aimed to assess the short- and long-term predictive power of the various components of an emergent literacy model on early writing abilities in a language with a mainly transparent orthography (Italian). Emergent literacy skills were assessed in 72 children (M age = 5.05 years, SD = plus or minus 0.03) who were…

English and German readers have been shown to mark a position to the left of the true centre as the subjective midpoint in word bisection. This effect resembles a well-known phenomenon observed with the bisection of solid lines (pseudoneglect), although this behavioural similarity does not imply a common origin. The purpose of the present study…

The two different models of bilingual/multilingual education that have been developed in Slovenia since the 1950s in the regions of Prekmurje (minority language Hungarian) and Slovene Istria (Italian) are the result of international agreements, education and language policies, social and demographic factors. The basic aim in both cases is to help…

For many language learners, studying a foreign language is a compulsory, high-stakes activity. It is perhaps for this reason that positive feelings about language learning are rarely mentioned in the literature on language learning. The focus is predominantly on negative feelings: the anxiety caused by being asked to speak in the foreign language…

This article investigates how two young newcomers navigate an institutional policy of "English only" in a Finnish primary school and how this policy impacts opportunities for voice. From a discourse analytic and sociolinguistic perspective, the analysis takes an ethnographic path to a focal event of language conflict in the classroom.…

Given that the linguistic articulators for sign language are also used to produce co-speech gesture, we examined whether one year of academic instruction in American Sign Language (ASL) impacts the rate and nature of gestures produced when speaking English. A survey study revealed that 75% of ASL learners (N = 95), but only 14% of Romance language…

Researchers on bilingual processing can benefit from computational tools developed in artificial intelligence. We show that a normalized Levenshtein distance function can efficiently and reliably simulate bilingual orthographic similarity ratings. Orthographic similarity distributions of cognates and non-cognates were identified across pairs of…

Morphosyntactic skills in spontaneous and elicited production of a 7-year-old boy with specific language impairment (SLI) were examined and compared to those of younger, mean length of utterance (MLU)-matched, typically-developing children. This study focused on inflectional phrase structures as well as complex constructions in order to…

Italian has for many years been considered somewhat of a specialist language when studied as a second language (L2) and this is perhaps due to historical and cultural factors. Its footprint worldwide compared to such languages as English, Spanish and French is therefore somewhat limited. Surprisingly, however, there is a considerable body of…

Statistical and linguistic procedures were implemented to analyze a large corpus of texts written by 37 individuals with autism and 92 facilitators (without disabilities), producing written conversations by means of PCs. Such texts were compared and contrasted to identify the specific traits of the lexis of the group of individuals with autism and…

Notwithstanding their potential for novel approaches to language teaching and learning, Virtual Worlds (VWs) present numerous technological and pedagogical challenges that require new paradigms if the language learning experience and outcomes are to be successful. In this presentation, we argue that the notions of presence and affordance, together…

The fact that people with minimal linguistic skill can manage in unfamiliar or reduced linguistic environments suggests that there are universal mechanisms of meaning construction that operate at a level well beyond the particular structure or semantics of any one language. The authors examine this possibility in the domain of discourse by…