Barbara Arfé

Clinical markers for specific language impairment in Italian: the contribution of clitics and non‐word repetition

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 disorders 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 study focuses on Italian. AIMS To determine whether three measures--the use of third-person plural inflections, the use of direct-object clitics and non-word repetition--are successful in distinguishing Italian-speaking children with SLI from their typically developing peers. METHODS & PROCEDURES Eleven preschool-aged children with SLI, 11 same-age typically developing peers and 11 younger typically developing children participated in the study. The third-person plural inflection and direct-object clitic tasks required the children to describe drawings in response to prompts provided by the examiner. In the non-word repetition task, the children repeated non-words ranging from one to four syllables in length. OUTCOMES & RESULTS All three measures proved successful either singly or in combination, with direct-object clitics and non-word repetition showing the highest sensitivity and specificity. CONCLUSIONS Additional research should be pursued to replicate and extend these findings. Along with the potential clinical value of the findings, the results suggest that difficulties with non-final weak syllables--a problem that would adversely affect all three measures--may be an important part of the SLI profile in Italian.

Reading Comprehension and Expressive Writing: A Comparison Between Good and Poor Comprehenders

This study investigated expressive writing in 8- to 10-year-old children with different levels of reading comprehension. Poor and good comprehenders were presented with three expressive writing tasks where the modality (pictorial vs. verbal) and the text genre (narrative vs. descriptive) varied. Results showed that poor comprehenders’ performance was minimally influenced by the modality of the prompt. In fact, their performance was generally worse than that of good comprehenders and affected by the text genre, as the quality of their narratives was generally lower than that of good comprehenders. However, in the descriptive text condition, their performance was comparable to that of good comprehenders. One can conclude that their problems depend on the characteristics of the narrative text where coherence and causality are important elements.

Typing pictures: Linguistic processing cascades into finger movements

The present study investigated the effect of psycholinguistic variables on measures of response latency and mean interkeystroke interval in a typewritten picture naming task, with the aim to outline the functional organization of the stages of cognitive processing and response execution associated with typewritten word production. Onset latencies were modulated by lexical and semantic variables traditionally linked to lexical retrieval, such as word frequency, age of acquisition, and naming agreement. Orthographic variables, both at the lexical and sublexical level, appear to influence just within-word interkeystroke intervals, suggesting that orthographic information may play a relevant role in controlling actual response execution. Lexical-semantic variables also influenced speed of execution. This points towards cascaded flow of activation between stages of lexical access and response execution.

The Contribution of Verbal Working Memory to Deaf Children’s Oral and Written Production

This study investigated the contribution of verbal working memory to the oral and written story production of deaf children. Participants were 29 severely to profoundly deaf children aged 8–13 years and 29 hearing controls, matched for grade level. The children narrated a picture story orally and in writing and performed a reading comprehension test, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition forward digit span task, and a reading span task. Oral and written stories were analyzed at the microstructural (i.e., clause) and macrostructural (discourse) levels. Hearing children’s stories scored higher than deaf children’s at both levels. Verbal working memory skills contributed to deaf children’s oral and written production over and above age and reading comprehension skills. Verbal rehearsal skills (forward digit span) contributed significantly to deaf children’s ability to organize oral and written stories at the microstructural level; they also accounted for unique variance at the macrostructural level in writing. Written story production appeared to involve greater verbal working memory resources than oral story production.

Oral and Written Discourse Skills in Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children: The Role of Reading and Verbal Working Memory.

This study examined the discourse skills of deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children by comparing their oral and written narratives produced for the wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969), with those of school-age-matched hearing peers. The written stories produced by 42 Italian 7- to 15-year-old children with moderate to profound hearing loss were compared with those of 48 school-age-matched hearing controls (age range = 7–13 years). The amount of linguistic information produced, measured as the number of words and clauses produced, the ability to generate a narrative structure, and coherence relations between the clauses of the story were investigated. The contribution of age, reading skills, and verbal working memory (measured as forward and backward digit span scores) were investigated relative to DHH childrens ability to produce connected discourse in oral and written modalities. Deaf and hard of hearing children showed poorer discourse skills in oral and written narration; however, their disadvantage appeared to be greater in the written modality. Reading comprehension skills accounted for significant variance in DHH childrens ability to generate narrative discourse. Yet, forward digit span scores, representing verbal rehearsal skills, contributed uniquely to the coherence of their narratives once age and reading comprehension were controlled. The contribution was greater in the written modality, suggesting that DHH childrens greater disadvantage in this modality was related to the greater cognitive costs of the writing task.

The Text Simplification in TERENCE

In this paper we present the TERENCE system of text simplification. The TERENCE simplification system is intended for use by researchers, educators and policy makers. The method is innovative in the field for two reasons. Firstly, differently from other methods of automatic or manual simplification, it offers a graded, cumulative, simplification of texts. Secondly, differently from other existing methods, it offers a system tailored for two groups of poor comprehenders (deaf and hearing). This paper illustrates the process of text simplification used in TERENCE and presents preliminary results of its testing with elementary school children.

Globally Minded Text Production: Bilingual, Expository Writing of Italian Adolescents Learning English

This study investigated micro- and macrostructural text features, and the impact of language-specific skills, on the bilingual, persuasive writing of 41 high school students learning English in Italy. Participants composed persuasive essays on 2 topics, each in Italian and English, and completed spelling and sentence generation tasks in both languages. Texts were assessed for fluency, productivity, complexity, and discourse quality. Repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to explore group differences between Italian and English writing. Correlations and regression analyses were used to investigate the impact of spelling and sentence generation on writing skills. Texts were more productive in English and more complex in Italian; however, no significant differences emerged between languages for fluency or discourse quality. In Italian writing, sentence generation skills affected only fluency. In English writing, spelling explained most of the variance in fluency and also impacted productivity, complexity, and quality. Results not only suggest cross-language transfer of discourse-level composition skills but also highlight the role of language-specific constraints in written text production.

Temporal and Causal Reasoning in Deaf and Hearing Novice Readers

Temporal and causal information in text are crucial in helping the reader form a coherent representation of a narrative. Deaf novice readers are generally poor at processing linguistic markers of causal/temporal information (i.e., connectives), but what is unclear is whether this is indicative of a more general deficit in reasoning about temporal/causal information. In Study 1, 10 deaf and 63 hearing children, matched for comprehension ability and age, were compared on a range of tasks tapping temporal/causal reasoning skills. In Study 2, 20 deaf and 32 hearing children, matched for age but not reading comprehension ability, were compared on revised versions of the tasks. The pattern of performance of the deaf was different from that of the hearing; they had difficulties when temporal and causal reasoning was text-based, but not when it was nonverbal, indicating that their global temporal/causal reasoning skills are comparable with those of their hearing counterparts.

Analogic and Symbolic Comparison of Numerosity in Preschool Children with Cochlear Implants

Abstract This study explores how preschoolers with cochlear implants process numerical comparisons from two different inputs: a) nonverbal (analogical) and b) verbal (symbolic). Preschool cochlear-implanted children (CI) ranging in age from 4;3 to 6;1 were compared with 99 age-matched hearing children (HC) in three numerical tasks: verbal counting, a digit comparison and a dot comparison. Results show that CI children may outperform HC in numerical tasks that require visuo-spatial analysis (e.g. analogical comparison). More importantly, they perform as well as HC in numerical tasks that require symbolic processes (digit comparison) and in verbal counting. However, when the influence of childrens verbal counting skills on digit comparison is examined differences between the two groups emerge. HCs capacity to compare digits was influenced by their knowledge of the verbal counting system, but this knowledge was not influential when CI childrens performance in the same task was considered. These findings suggest that different strategies may characterize the way the two groups tackle symbolic numerical comparisons. The educational and instructional implications of these findings are discussed.

Timed written picture naming in 14 European languages

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217–236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded responses in their first language under controlled experimental conditions (N = 1,274, with subsamples responding in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). We measured the time to initiate a response (RT) and interkeypress intervals, and calculated measures of name and spelling agreement. There was a tendency across all languages for quicker RTs to pictures with higher familiarity, image agreement, and name frequency, and with higher name agreement. Effects of spelling agreement and effects on output rates after writing onset were present in some, but not all, languages. Written naming therefore shows name retrieval effects that are similar to those found in speech, but our findings suggest the need for cross-language comparisons as we seek to understand the orthographic retrieval and/or assembly processes that are specific to written output.