This paper compares the proportions of different word classes present in 30 Italian children at two specific stages of vocabulary development (200 and 500 words). The Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory and spontaneous speech samples produced during an observation session were both used to examine the extent to which these children produce quantitatively different vocabulary compositions. Both methods revealed a greater presence of nouns than other word classes in the sample studied, although significant differences were found in the noun/other word class proportions.

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This follow-up study compares cognitive and language aspects of a group of Italian children ages 4-6 years, who had shown delayed expressive language abilities at 24 months of age (late talkers), with those of a group of children with a history of normal expressive language development (average talkers). Children were given a battery of cognitive-neuropsychological tests to assess grammatical comprehension, vocabulary development, verbal short-term memory, phonological awareness, planning and visuomotor coordination, and attention and impulsiveness. No differences were found in the results between the two groups in the domains of attention, impulsiveness, and visuomotor planning, but in the domain of syntactic competence late talkers developed particular difficulties in the comprehension of passive negative sentences compared to average talkers. Late talkers also performed significantly worse on the nonword repetition task, which measures abilities closely connected with verbal short-term memory and phonological awareness.In the past two decades, researchers and clinicians have increasingly focused on the early characterization and identification of young children with delayed language acquisition, termed late talkers (LTs). LTs are identified on the basis of their restricted expressive language abilities when they are approximately 2 years of age; their main characteristic is a considerable delay in linguistic production