169,808 research outputs found
Monodialectal and multidialectal infants’ representation of familiar words
No full textMonolingual infants are typically studied as a homogenous group and compared to bilingual infants. This study looks further into two subgroups of monolingual infants, monodialectal and multidialectal, to identify the effects of dialect-related variation on the phonological representation of words. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task, the detection of mispronunciations in familiar words was compared in infants aged 1;8 exposed to consistent (monodialectal) or variable (multidialectal) pronunciations of words in their daily input. Only monodialectal infants detected the mispronunciations whereas multidialectal infants looked longer at the target following naming whether the label was correctly produced or not. This suggests that variable phonological input in the form of dialect variation impacts the degree of specificity of lexical representations in early infancy
The role of Italian Language Exposure on bilingual toddlers in Italian lexical and grammar skills
No full textAbstract
The present dissertation explores bilingual language outcomes in comparison to monolingual peers, investigating the predictive factors which affect language achievements, the parental educational background and the language assessment measurements available. This doctoral thesis is divided in 8 chapters. Specifically, Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 provide an overview of the theoretical frameworks on bilingualism and on language exposure respectively, used in the present dissertation. Chapter 3 provides the methodological approach used throughout this study. Chapter 4 focuses on the main results of this project: with a sample of 107 participants (55 monolinguals and 52 bilinguals aged 33 to 41 months old), monolinguals were found to perform better than bilinguals for all the language measurements. Moreover, bilinguals’ language exposure, calculated with the Italian Language Exposure Questionnaire, adapted from the English Plymouth Language Exposure Questionnaire (Cattani et al., 2014), was predictive of their language outcomes in vocabulary comprehension and production, and in grammar comprehension tasks. Moreover, for each measurement it was found a threshold of Italian language exposure over which bilinguals performed as monolinguals, and it was 47% for MacArthur-Bates CDI, 55% for PinG test while for PCGO it could not be calculated. Therefore, bilingual children who are above those levels of Italian Language Exposure, could be assessed with the standardized tests available for monolinguals.
Chapter 5 provides an overview of the role of maternal and paternal education on monolinguals’ and bilinguals’ language outcomes; for monolinguals, maternal education levels had a positive impact on direct measurements of noun production (PinG noun production) and paternal education levels had a positive impact on noun production and total words production (PinG word production and noun production); meanwhile, for bilinguals, maternal and paternal education significantly predicted all the language measurements. Moreover, Chapter 6 explores the existence of a noun bias in Italian language acquisition, for monolinguals and bilinguals.
Chapter 7 and 8 present the limitations of the study and conclusions. Overall, this study emphasizes the importance of language exposure and parental education in shaping bilingual language development, offering valuable tools for identifying bilingual children at risk of developmental language disorders (DLD), contributing to more effective early intervention strategies
Linee guida per il censimento e il monitoraggio dei macromiceti in Italia
No full textExecutive summary
Guidelines for the census and monitoring of macromycetes
According to the FFF initiative (Fauna Flora Funga), fungi should be recognized as playing a crucial role in ecosystem functioning. Therefore, it is time to include fungi in the global conservation goals. The fungal kingdom is equally as important as the animal and plant kingdoms for the understanding of our planet, and fungi are key for interpreting the functioning and resilience of ecosystems.
There is a growing public consciousness of the role of fungi in the environment and the necessity to conserve them and their habitats.
Recording mycological data is important to improve local and national distribution maps of fungi. High quality data also allows the comparison of past and present findings to understand the changes in biodiversity that have occurred over time. In addition, reliable data for local and national Red Lists emphasizes the mycological value of sites that may be subject to planning applications.
In Italy, there are numerous mycological groups and associations that record local fungi around the country. There are also many mycologists who work independently in the field. Consequently, there is a large dataset representing an invaluable resource with enormous potential.
However, until now, each mycologist or group has been using their own collection and registration rules and standards. Establishing and sharing common protocols for collection has therefore become essential.
In 2020, the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research ISPRA (Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale) developed a Network for the study of mycological diversity.
One of the most important initiatives of the Network is the “National collecting of fungi”. Its first goal is to collect fungal data in a national database, the “Fungi Information System” (SIF, Sistema Informativo Funghi), encouraging mycologists, experts, and groups to record their local findings in a systematic format and submit them to the SIF. The database will include not only edible fungi but all fungal species that may be indicators of habitat quality.
This is the first national initiative that aims to collect data from different sources, sent autonomously and voluntarily, so that Italy has a database to help policy makers to include fungi in national and regional legislation.
It is in this context that these guidelines have been proposed. Starting from the basic principles of collection, to providing instructions for sending mycological and habitat data to the Network, the recording procedures have been established with the main objective of sharing them with stakeholders at all levels.
To carry out future conservation actions we need data on a nation-wide scale, so let’s start
Children in a wonderland:How language and scale errors may be linked.
No full textPrevious research showed that young children sometimes fail to use information about object size and make a serious attempt to perform impossible actions on miniature objects. Such scale errors have been hypothesized to result from immaturity in the interaction of the two visual streams, namely the visual stream for action and the visual stream for perception, coupled to a lack of inhibitory control in children. Here we propose that such dissociation in the action-perception system may be influenced by the developing language skills and report new evidence showing that children in a particular period of their language development are more prone to show scale errors. The results showed that the total number of nouns, but not adjectives in children's productive vocabulary seems to be an important factor for predicting scale errors. We argue that realising a model of scale errors is essential for understanding the relationship between language, object representation and motor system, and especially their interaction during development
Children’s scale errors: A by-product of lexical development?
No full textScale errors occur when young children seriously attempt to perform an action on an object which is impossible due to its size. Children vary substantially in the incidence of scale errors with many factors potentially contributing to these differences, such as age and the type of scale errors. In particular, the evidence for an inverted U-shaped curve of scale errors involving the child's body (i.e., body scale errors), which would point to a developmental stage, is mixed. Here we re-examine how body scale errors vary with age and explore the possibility that these errors would be related to the size and properties of children's lexicon. A large sample of children aged 18–30 months (N = 125) was tested in a scale error elicitation situation. Additionally, parental questionnaires were collected to assess children's receptive and expressive lexicon. Our key findings are that scale errors linearly decrease with age in childhood, and are more likely to be found in early talkers rather than in less advanced ones. This suggests that scale errors do not correspond to a developmental stage, and that one determinant of these errors is the speed of development of the linguistic and conceptual system, as a potential explanation for the individual variability in prevalence
Decreased attention to object size information in scale errors performers
No full textYoung children sometimes make serious attempts to perform impossible actions on miniature objects as if they were full-size objects. The existing explanations of these curious action errors assume (but never explicitly tested) children's decreased attention to object size information. This study investigated the attention to object size information in scale errors performers. Two groups of children aged 18–25 months (N = 52) and 48–60 months (N = 23) were tested in two consecutive tasks: an action task that replicated the original scale errors elicitation situation, and a looking task that involved watching on a computer screen actions performed with adequate to inadequate size object. Our key finding – that children performing scale errors in the action task subsequently pay less attention to size changes than non-scale errors performers in the looking task – suggests that the origins of scale errors in childhood operate already at the perceptual level, and not at the action level
Gestures and words in naming: Evidence from crosslinguistic and crosscultural comparison
No full textWe report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2‐year‐old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments. Eighty‐seven monolingual children aged 24–30 months completed an experimental task measuring their comprehension and production of nouns and predicates. The Italian children scored significantly higher than the other groups on all lexical measures. With regard to gestures, British children produced significantly fewer pointing and speech combinations compared to Italian and Australian children, who did not differ from each other. In contrast, Italian children produced significantly more representational gestures than the other two groups. We conclude that spoken language development is primarily influenced by the input language over gesture production, whereas the combination of cultural and language environments affects gesture production
Children’s scale errors are a natural consequence of learning to associate objects with actions: a computational model
No full textYoung children sometimes attempt an action on an object, which is inappropriate because of the object size -- they make scale errors. Existing theories suggest that scale errors may result from immaturities in children’s action planning system, which might be overpowered by increased complexity of object representations or developing teleofunctional bias. We used computational modelling to emulate children’s learning to associate objects with actions and to select appropriate actions, given object shape and size. A computational Developmental Deep Model of Action and Naming (DDMAN) was built on the dual-route theory of action selection, in which actions on objects are selected via a direct (non-semantic or visual) route, or an indirect (semantic) route. As in case of children, DDMAN produced scale errors: the number of errors was high at the beginning of training and decreased linearly but did not disappear completely. Inspection of emerging object-action associations revealed that these were coarsely organized by shape, hence leading DDMAN to initially select actions based on shape rather than size. With experience, DDMAN gradually learned to use size in addition to shape when selecting actions. Overall, our simulations demonstrate that children’s scale errors are a natural consequence of learning to associate objects with actions
How much exposure to English is necessary for a bilingual toddler to perform like a monolingual peer in language tests?
No full textBackground
Bilingual children are under‐referred due to an ostensible expectation that they lag behind their monolingual peers in their English acquisition. The recommendations of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) state that bilingual children should be assessed in both the languages known by the children. However, despite these recommendations, a majority of speech and language professionals report that they assess bilingual children only in English as bilingual children come from a wide array of language backgrounds and standardized language measures are not available for the majority of these. Moreover, even when such measures do exist, they are not tailored for bilingual children.
Aims
It was asked whether a cut‐off exists in the proportion of exposure to English at which one should expect a bilingual toddler to perform as well as a monolingual on a test standardized for monolingual English‐speaking children.
Methods & Procedures
Thirty‐five bilingual 2;6‐year‐olds exposed to British English plus an additional language and 36 British monolingual toddlers were assessed on the auditory component of the Preschool Language Scale, British Picture Vocabulary Scale and an object‐naming measure. All parents completed the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (Oxford CDI) and an exposure questionnaire that assessed the proportion of English in the language input. Where the CDI existed in the bilingual's additional language, these data were also collected.
Outcomes & Results
Hierarchical regression analyses found the proportion of exposure to English to be the main predictor of the performance of bilingual toddlers. Bilingual toddlers who received 60% exposure to English or more performed like their monolingual peers on all measures. K‐means cluster analyses and Levene variance tests confirmed the estimated English exposure cut‐off at 60% for all language measures. Finally, for one additional language for which we had multiple participants, additional language CDI production scores were significantly inversely related to the amount of exposure to English.
Conclusions & Implications
Typically developing 2;6‐year‐olds who are bilingual in English and an additional language and who hear English 60% of the time or more, perform equivalently to their typically developing monolingual peers
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