Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children’s performance in a nonword pluralization task

Vender, Maria; Mantione, Federica; Savazzi, Silvia; Delfitto, Denis; Melloni, Chiara

doi:10.1007/s11881-017-0152-8

Cited by 25 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Differences in vocabulary, but not in literacy, WM, and phonological competence are instead in line with the literature describing the typical profile of bilingual children (Bialystok et al, 2010). Since receptive vocabulary is reported to be relatively unimpaired in dyslexia (Vender et al, 2017), the fact that bilingual controls underperformed monolingual dyslexics and that no negative effects of dyslexia were observed should not be surprising.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit Learning, Bilingualism, and Dyslexia: Insights From a Study Assessing AGL With a Modified Simon Task

et al. 2019

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This paper presents an experimental study investigating artificial grammar learning in monolingual and bilingual children, with and without dyslexia, using an original methodology. We administered a serial reaction time task, in the form of a modified Simon task, in which the sequence of the stimuli was manipulated according to the rules of a simple Lindenmayer grammar (more specifically, a Fibonacci grammar). By ensuring that the subjects focused on the correct response execution at the motor stage in presence of congruent or incongruent visual stimuli, we could meet the two fundamental criteria for implicit learning: the absence of an intention to learn and the lack of awareness at the level of resulting knowledge. The participants of our studies were four groups of 10-year-old children: 30 Italian monolingual typically developing children, 30 bilingual typically developing children with Italian L2, 24 Italian monolingual dyslexic children, and 24 bilingual dyslexic children with Italian L2. Participants were administered the modified Simon task developed according to the rules of the Fibonacci grammar and tested with respect to the implicit learning of three regularities: (i) a red is followed by a blue, (ii) a sequence of two blues is followed by a red, and (iii) a blue can be followed either by a red or by a blue. Results clearly support the hypothesis that learning took place, since participants of all groups became increasingly sensitive to the structure of the input, implicitly learning the sequence of the trials and thus appropriately predicting the occurrence of the relevant items, as manifested by faster reaction times in predictable trials. Moreover, group differences were found, with bilinguals being overall faster than monolinguals and dyslexics less accurate than controls. Finally, an advantage of bilingualism in dyslexia was found, with bilingual dyslexics performing consistently better than monolingual dyslexics and, in some conditions, at the level of the two control groups. These results are taken to suggest that bilingualism should be supported also among linguistically impaired individuals.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicit Learning, Bilingualism, and Dyslexia: Insights From a Study Assessing AGL With a Modified Simon Task

et al. 2019

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“…If the child can provide the correct derived form of a non-existing word, we might have rather uncontroversial evidence that the child possesses and is able to apply the derivational rules. To date, morphological tasks involving non-words appear to be mostly used to test competence for inflectional rules (as in the popular Wug Test; see in Italian, for instance, Vender et al, 2017). It appears therefore that a morphological awareness task constructed on nonsense material might represent a promising future path of our work.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Morphological Awareness a Relevant Predictor of Reading Fluency and Comprehension? New Evidence From Italian Monolingual and Arabic-Italian Bilingual Children

Vernice

Pagliarini

2018

Front. Commun.

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In this study, we examined the contribution of morphological awareness to reading competence in a group of Italian L1 and Arabic-Italian early L2 children, i.e., exposed to Italian before 3 years of age. Children from first to fifth grade (age range: 6-11 years old) were tested on a range of morphological awareness and lexical tasks. Reading ability was tested through standardized tests of reading fluency and comprehension. Results showed that L1 children outperformed L2 on every measure of morphological awareness, as well as on reading tests. Regression analyses revealed that morphological awareness contributed to a different extent to reading ability across groups. Accuracy in the morphological awareness tasks was a significant predictor of word (and non-word) reading fluency in L1 and L2 first and second graders, while only in L1 third to fifth graders, response times and accuracy to a morphological awareness task explained a unique amount of variance in reading comprehension. Our results highlight the critical role of morphological processing in reading efficiency and suggest that a training inspired by morphological awareness may improve reading skills also in bilingual students.

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“…In our task, children were asked to provide the plural of invented words, modeled after the phonotactic structures of Italian, divided in five conditions which corresponded to distinct declension classes of noun pluralization in Italian and entailing different levels of complexity (see Vender et al 2017 for a more detailed description of the task and Vender et al 2018 andMelloni et al (2017) for two studies on bilinguals). In a typical example, the child was presented with the picture of an invented character and was told: Questa è la muva ('This is the muva': the experimenter points to the picture of the invented character).…”

Section: Morphological Competencementioning

confidence: 99%

Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters

2018

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Abstract:The aim of this work is to investigate how bilingual children perform with respect to monolingual children in a task eliciting direct object clitic pronouns in Italian. Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) (Bortolini et al. 2006). Moreover, this task is reported to be particularly challenging for early second language children (EL2), who are less accurate than their peers in this task (Vender et al. 2016). Even though the typology of errors committed by the two populations (non-impaired bilinguals and SLI children) is generally different, it can be difficult to keep them apart from each other and, as a consequence, to identify a language impairment in bilingual children. However, it has been suggested that the difficulties exhibited by EL2 children in clitic production are related to their competence in their L2 and that they should disappear as soon as their mastery of the L2 increases. To test this prediction, we assessed clitic production in a group of 31 bilingual children having Italian as their L2 (mean age 10;2), comparing their performance to that of a group of 33 Italian monolingual children (mean age 10;2). The bilingual children used their L1 on a daily basis, as assessed by means of a bilingual exposure questionnaire, and had on average eight years of exposure to Italian; moreover, they performed similarly to monolinguals in a receptive vocabulary task, indicating that their competence in Italian was good. Consistently with our predictions, we found that bilingual children performed very accurately in the clitic elicitation task, similarly to monolinguals, confirming that the deficits previously found in EL2 children were not related to bilingualism itself, but more likely to their still incomplete competence in Italian.

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Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children’s performance in a nonword pluralization task

Cited by 25 publications

References 49 publications

Implicit Learning, Bilingualism, and Dyslexia: Insights From a Study Assessing AGL With a Modified Simon Task

Implicit Learning, Bilingualism, and Dyslexia: Insights From a Study Assessing AGL With a Modified Simon Task

Is Morphological Awareness a Relevant Predictor of Reading Fluency and Comprehension? New Evidence From Italian Monolingual and Arabic-Italian Bilingual Children

Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters

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