M. Chiara Levorato

The creation of new figurative expressions: psycholinguistic evidence in Italian children, adolescents and adults

According to a developmental model of figurative language acquisition--the global elaboration model (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995)--the metalinguistic awareness necessary to use figurative language in a creative way is acquired late, and is subsequent to the ability to comprehend and produce figurative expressions. One hundred and eight children aged 9;6, one hundred and twenty-four children aged 11;3, one hundred and twelve adolescents aged 18;5 and one hundred adults participated in Experiment 1 which studied the development of metalinguistic awareness through an elicitation task. The subjects produced a high percentage of figurative expressions with a clear developmental trend that is concluded in adolescence. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that the production of comprehensible, appropriate and novel metaphors, as they were rated by adult judges, also increased with age. These results show that the ability to use figurative language in a creative and sensible way requires a long developmental time span and is strictly connected with the ability to reflect on language as a complex cognitive and interpersonal phenomenon.

The relationship between listening comprehension of text and sentences in preschoolers: Specific or mediated by lower and higher level components?

Two studies explored the relation between listening comprehension of text and listening comprehension of sentences in preschoolers aged 4 to 5 years, 11 months. The first study analyzed this relationship taking into account the role of lower level components, namely, word knowledge and verbal working memory, as possible mediators. These components specifically accounted for listening text comprehension, whereas sentence comprehension did not. Given that sentences forming a text are not processed in isolation but in context, the second study explored the role of the ability to use linguistic context, a higher level component, in listening comprehension of text and sentences. Listening sentence comprehension was facilitated by the use of context, which accounted for individual differences in listening text comprehension. Overall, results showed that listening text comprehension is related to lower level as well as higher level components, whereas listening sentence comprehension does not play a specific role.

A longitudinal study of idiom and text comprehension.

The relation between text and idiom comprehension in children with poor text comprehension skills was investigated longitudinally. In the first phase of the study, six-year-old first graders with different levels of text comprehension were compared in an idiom and sentence comprehension task. Text comprehension was shown to be more closely related to idiom comprehension than sentence comprehension. The follow-up study, carried out eight months later on less-skilled text comprehenders, investigated whether an improvement in text comprehension was paralleled by an improvement in idiom comprehension. The development of sentence comprehension was also taken into account. Children who improved in text comprehension also improved in idiom comprehension; this improvement was, instead, weakly related to an improvement in sentence comprehension. The relationship between text and idiom comprehension is discussed in the light of the Global Elaboration Model (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995).

Text comprehension in Down syndrome: The role of lower and higher level abilities

The contribution of lower level linguistic abilities (study 1) and a higher level capacity, namely the use of context, (study 2), on text comprehension was studied. Participants were 16 individuals with Down syndrome aged between aged between 8 years 11 months and 16 years 10 months, and 16 children with typical development, aged between 5 years 11 months and 7 years 3 months, matched for the level of text comprehension. In study 1 the two groups were compared for receptive vocabulary and sentence comprehension: both of them were shown to play a role in text comprehension in Down syndrome. Since participants with Down syndrome had very low scores in sentence comprehension, study 2 tested the hypothesis that when sentences were presented within a brief context, individuals with Down syndrome would perform better. This hypothesis was confirmed and it was shown that contextual facilitation was closely related to text comprehension skills.

The Advantage of Reading over Listening Text Comprehension in Down Syndrome: What Is the Role of Verbal Memory?.

The current study was designed to investigate the role played by verbal memory in the advantage shown by individuals with Down syndrome in reading over listening text comprehension (Roch & Levorato, 2009). Two different aspects of verbal memory were analyzed: processing load and coding modality. Participants were 20 individuals with Down syndrome, aged between 11 and 26 years who were matched for reading comprehension with a group of 20 typically developing children aged between 6;3 and 7;3 years. The two groups were presented with a listening comprehension test and four verbal memory tasks in which the degree of processing load and the coding modality were manipulated. The results of the study confirmed the advantage of reading over listening comprehension for individuals with Down syndrome. Furthermore, it emerged that different aspects of verbal memory were related respectively to reading and to listening comprehension: visual memory with low processing load was related to the former and oral memory with high processing load to the latter. Finally, it was demonstrated that verbal memory contributed to explain the advantage of reading over listening comprehension in Down syndrome. The results are discussed in light of their theoretical relevance and practical implications.

Conceptual and Lexical Knowledge of Shame in Italian Children and Adolescents

In the present study, the development of knowledge of nonmoral shame in Italian children and adolescents was investigated. The issues addressed were: (a) how the development of the ability to identify appropriate antecedents of shame is achieved (Experiment 1); and (b) the acquisition of the ability to use linguistic labels to refer to this emotion (Experiment 2). Two cross-sectional experiments were conducted with participants aged from 5 years 8 months to 18 years 5 months. In the first experiment, participants were asked for an antecedent of shame; in the second, they were asked to describe an emotion for each of the six antecedents proposed in the experimental setting. Results showed that the conceptual structure of shame is developed during primary school. Among adolescents, however, the need for privacy emerged, and “embarrassment” was given more frequently than shame. In both experiments participants were asked for an explanation of the emotional experience of shame. Correspondence analysis on the explanations given in Experiment 1 showed that two dimensions underlie the conception of shame: The first, which develops in primary school, is intersubjectivity and consideration of the group. The second, which develops during adolescence, is intrasubjectivity and consideration of personal motives. The analysis of the explanations given in Experiment 2 showed that, when the word “shame” was produced, the explanation focused mainly on the fear of being exposed to an audience.

Cross-Linguistic Developmental Evidence of Implicit Causality In Visual Perception and Cognition Verbs

The general background of this investigation is the study of the development of language as related to mental or psychological activities. Research in “theory of mind” has shown interesting relationships between the development of children’s understanding of mental life and the development of language in the early years (e.g.Bretherton & Beeghley, 1982; Bartsch & Wellman, 1995). Moreover, it has been suggested that children’s knowledge about mental verbs may be linked specifically to later developments of “theory of mind” in children (Moore & Furrow, 1991; Schwanenflugel et al., 1996).

Children's Memory for Goal-Directed Events.

This study is concerned with childrens representation of goal‐directed action sequences. Its aim was to investigate the role of plan schemata in guiding the coding of both of visually and verbally presented action sequences. In particular, it tested the amodality hypothesis proposed by Lichtenstein and Brewer (1980). A preliminary experiment studied childrens representation of two structurally different action sequences: An additive plan and a hierarchical plan. In the main experiment the two action sequences were presented via a text or a film to first, third, and fifth graders, who later recalled them. The results partially agree with the amodality hypothesis: Mode of presentation did not affect the recall of most important actions. However, an interaction between type of plan and mode of presentation was registered: Less important actions of the hierarchical plan are recalled better when presented verbally. A syntactic‐semantic analysis of the recalls confirmed the facilitating effect of verbal prese...

The Reader in the Text: The Construction of Literary Characters

When we read the description of a character, we receive explicit information and construct a semantic representation of his/her aspect and personality. This constructive process also involves inferential processes based on the elaboration of explicit information. In this article we examined the first introduction of four female characters in Italian novels. When readers reported information that was not given in the texts, we had evidence of their constructive processes based on their inferences and world knowledge. In our study readers tended to concretize traits that were not explicitly stated in the text, with high values of the Gini index, showing different concretizations in different readers. This tendency was quite pervasive among readers, regardless of gender, academic education and interest in the text read; such constructive process seems to be intrinsic to the act of reading itself.

Children's beliefs about authorship

Two studies investigated childrens beliefs about texts and their origins in an authors mind. In Study 1, 80 children between 4 and 7 years of age were interviewed during a dialogic story-reading activity to investigate their level of awareness about the authors existence and his or her mental processes. Study 2, involving only 5-and 6-year-olds, tested the hypothesis that guided reflection on fictional realities in a story might facilitate childrens understanding that an author exists and that a story is the result of his or her mental activity. Results show that mature conceptions of the mental origins of the text appear around the age of 7 but that structured reflection about the fictional nature of the story may trigger this awareness starting around the age of 5 or 6.