Rachele Fanari

Effects of drinking supplementary water at school on cognitive performance in children

We investigated the beneficial effects of drinking supplementary water during the school day on the cognitive performance and transitory subjective states, such as fatigue or vigor, in 168 children aged between 9 and 11years who were living in a hot climate (South Italy, Sardinia). The classes were randomly divided into an intervention group, which received water supplementation, and a control group. Dehydration was determined by urine sampling and was defined as urine osmolality greater than 800mOsm/kg H(2)O (Katz, Massry, Agomn, & Toor, 1965). The change in the scores from the morning to the afternoon of hydration levels, cognitive performance and transitory subjective states were correlated. In line with a previous observational study that evaluated the hydration status of school children living in a country with a hot climate (Bar-David, Urkin, & Kozminsky, 2005), our results showed that a remarkable proportion of children were in a state of mild, voluntary dehydration at the beginning of the school day (84%). We found a significant negative correlation between dehydration and the auditory number span, which indicates a beneficial effect of drinking supplementary water at school on short-term memory. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between dehydration and performance in the verbal analogy task. The results are discussed in the light of the complexity of the neurobiological mechanisms involved in the relationship between hydration status and cognition.

Acquiring Regular and Irregular Inflection in a Language with Verb Classes

The dual mechanism model claims that only rule-generated inflections are productive; that is, can be applied to words borrowed from other languages or derived from other grammatical categories (e.g. verbs derived from nouns or adjectives). Productivity, high generalisability and insensitivity to type or token frequency effects are intertwined properties of rule-generated inflections across languages (Pinker, 1991). We tested this cross-linguistic prediction in two experiments investigating Italian childrens spontaneous performance with the past definite (Experiment 1) and their elicited performance with the past definite and the past participle (Experiment 2). Our findings show that performance profiles with productive and unproductive inflections cannot be “categorically distinguished”. The phonologically transparent morphological patterns exhibited by an unproductive verb class are high in generalisability when children make errors with root change verbs. The morphological patterns exhibited by a semi-...

Descriptive norms for 245 Italian idiomatic expressions.

The present study reports descriptive normative measures for 245 Italian verbal idiomatic expressions. For each of the idiomatic expressions the following variables are reported: Length, Knowledge, Familiarity, Age of Acquisition, Predictability, Syntactic flexibility, Literality and Compositionality. Syntactic flexibility was assessed using five syntactic operations: adverb insertion, adjective insertion, left dislocation, passive and movement. The psycholinguistic relevance of each dimension, their measures and the correlations among them are provided and discussed. The databases are freely available for down-loading from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

The role of idiom length and context in spoken idiom comprehension

Two cross-modal lexical decision experiments investigated the role of the length of the idiom string (Experiment 1) and of prior sentential context (Experiment 2) in spoken idiom recognition. The idiomatic meaning was activated at the offset of long idioms but not of short idioms when the idiom was preceded by a neutral context. The idiomatic meaning of short idioms was instead activated at the string offset when the idiom was preceded by an idiomatic context. The results support the Configuration Hypothesis (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988).

Syllabic Effects in Italian Lexical Access

Two cross-modal priming experiments tested whether lexical access is constrained by syllabic structure in Italian. Results extend the available Italian data on the processing of stressed syllables showing that syllabic information restricts the set of candidates to those structurally consistent with the intended word (Experiment 1). Lexical access, however, takes place as soon as possible and it is not delayed till the incoming input corresponds to the first syllable of the word. And, the initial activated set includes candidates whose syllabic structure does not match the intended word (Experiment 2). The present data challenge the early hypothesis that in Romance languages syllables are the units for lexical access during spoken word recognition. The implications of the results for our understanding of the role of syllabic information in language processing are discussed.

Phonotactic regularities in the segmentation of spoken Italian

Five word-spotting experiments explored the role of consonantal and vocalic phonotactic cues in the segmentation of spoken Italian. The first set of experiments tested listeners’ sensitivity to phonotactic constraints cueing syllable boundaries. Participants were slower in spotting words in nonsense strings when target onsets were misaligned (e.g., lago in ri.blago) than when they were aligned (e.g., lago in rin.lago) with phonotactically determined syllabic boundaries. This effect held also for sequences that occur only word-medially (e.g., /tl/ in ri.tlago), and competition effects could not account for the disadvantage in the misaligned condition. Similarly, target detections were slower when their offsets were misaligned (e.g., cittá in cittáu.ba) than when they were aligned (e.g., cittá in cittá.oba) with a phonotactic syllabic boundary. The second set of experiments tested listeners’ sensitivity to phonotactic cues, which specifically signal lexical (and not just syllable) boundaries. Results corroborate the role of syllabic information in speech segmentation and suggest that Italian listeners make little use of additional phonotactic information that specifically cues word boundaries.

Semantic Abilities Predict Expressive Lexicon in Children with Typical and Atypical Language Development

In this study we used a semantic battery assessing the conceptual, lexical, and metacognitive level in semantic relationships to predict expressive lexicon in preschool children with typical and atypical language development. Our regression analyses showed that the tests of our semantic battery altogether accounted for 24% of variance in expressive lexicon after controlling for age and phonological short-term memory. The ability to memorize picture-cue/word pairs that were linked by taxonomic relations made a unique contribution to the expressive lexicon, and was a reliable marker of delayed expressive vocabulary in a group of children with specific language impairment.