Implicit Grammatical Gender Representation in Italian Children with Autism without Intellectual/Language Disorder

Grammatical language development in individuals with autism (without intellectual/language impairment) is mostly qualitatively comparable to language development in typically developing children of the same age. The majority of tasks used to study grammatical development require explicit performance (use of verbal language). Here, we administered an implicit categorization task (by biological sex) to understand which markers children use to implicitly infer grammatical gender representation in Italian (a gendered language where grammatical gender can be inferred via a determiner and/or word ending). Participants were asked to categorize photos of animals, relying on the names that differed in regard to the grammatical markers involved (i.e., lexical semantic, phonological, syntactic or phonological + syntactic). Children with autism displayed the same patterns observed in typically developing children: the lexical-semantic marker was categorized more accurately, followed in decreasing order by the phonological-syntactic marker and the phonological marker. The syntactic marker was the most difficult to categorize for both groups. In addition, children with autism showed an advantage in grammatical gender representation when using formal/grammatical markers than when using lexical/semantic markers. Such an implicit assessment allows for the investigation of more nuanced linguistic representations other than those expressed by traditional assessments.

Efficacy of ICT-based interventions in improving psychological outcomes among older adults with MCI and dementia: A systematic review and meta-analysis

The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to investigate empirical evidence about the effectiveness of Information and Communication Technology-based interventions (ICTs) on different psychological outcomes in adults aged over 60 years with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or dementia. We conducted a systematic search on Pubmed, Web of Science, Scopus, and PsycInfo with publication year between January 2010 up to April 2021. Any pre-post quantitative intervention study with at least one of the following domains examined: quality of life (QoL), psychological well-being, social interaction, engagement, mood, anxiety, stress, loneliness, self-efficacy, or self-esteem was included. The risk of bias and quality of evidence were assessed using tools based on the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Review of Interventions criteria. Forty-eight studies with a total of 1488 participants met the selection criteria. Because of the high heterogeneity, we ran nine different random effects meta-analyses divided by outcome and type of cognitive decline which indicated that these treatments were ineffective overall, with some exceptions. Only anxiety (small effect size =-0.375 [-0.609; -0.140]) and behavioral symptoms (BS) (medium effect size =-0.585 [-1.019; -0.152]) in people with dementia (PwD) were found to change significantly. Moreover, effect sizes for QoL in dementia and for mood in people with MCI became significant when moderated by type of ICT, living situation, and experimental setting. In particular, Virtual Reality (VR) appeared to be more effective than other devices for both PwD and MCI, and nursing homes were found to be the best setting for administering these treatments. The trim and fill method found no evidence of publication bias in any of the 9 analyses. However, quality of evidence within (RoB 2, RoB 2 Crossover, ROBINS) and across (GRADE assessment) studies was low, thus these findings should be interpreted with caution. In general, ICT-based intervention can be considered a promising approach for improving anxiety and BS in PwD, and for improving QoL in PwD and mood in people with MCI, specifically when VR is used, when participants live in nursing homes, and when interventions are carried out in nursing homes.¹.

Social Status and Emotional Competence in Bullying: A Longitudinal Study of the Transition From Kindergarten to Primary School

Moving on to a higher level of schooling represents a crucial developmental challenge for children: studies have shown that transitioning to a new school context can increase the perceived importance of peer acceptance, popularity, and adaptation to the new social environment. The aim of this study was to investigate simultaneously the influence of interpersonal variables (social status indices) and personal variables (empathy and understanding of emotions) on role-taking in bullying episodes (hostile, prosocial, victim, and outsider roles) from a longitudinal perspective. These variables were assessed on 41 children in their last year of kindergarten (t1) and in their 1st year of primary school (t2). The main longitudinal results showed that prosocial behaviors are more stable than hostile, victim, and outsider behaviors. Moreover, social preference—together with affective empathy—at t1 had a clear negative predictive effect on hostile roles at t2, while social preference had a positive effect on prosocial roles at t2. Social impact at t1 negatively predicted being a victim at t2. On the other hand, social preference at t2 was negatively predicted only by the victim role at t1. Social impact at t1 had a significant and negative effect on being victimized at t2 while was negatively predicted at t2 by the outsider at t1. Our study—even if exploratory—seems to highlight the existence of a specific, differentiate effect of two distinct social status indices on the participant role-taking in bullying episodes in the transitional period from kindergarten to primary school.

Implicit Representation of Grammatical Gender in Italian Children with Developmental Language Disorder: An Exploratory Study on Phonological and/or Syntactic Sensitivity

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) display impaired phonological and/or morpho-syntactic skills. To detect these impairments, it would be of value to devise tasks that assess specific markers of implicit linguistic competence. We administered a forced choice semantic categorization task developed in Italian (Belacchi and Cubelli in Journal of psycholinguistic research 41:295-310, 2012) for detecting the implicit use of grammatical gender markers in classifying epicenes names of animals: phonological and/or syntactic. Seventy Italian children with expressive-phonological DLD (mean age: 61.20 months) were compared with a same-size control group. Overall, the children with DLD performed more poorly than the control group. Also, the DLD participants used the phonological index to a significantly lesser extent, confirming their specific impairment in the phonological processing of words. The current study provided evidence for the status of phonological discrimination skills as a precursor of language development, and the value of using categorization tasks to assess implicit linguistic competence in children with DLD.

Semantic memory and reading comprehension: the relationship through adulthood and aging

Literature shows a relationship between working memory and reading comprehension during lifespan and aging. In addition, a difference between genres of text was shown: the expository text affects the already limited cognitive resources of the older adults, whereas narrative text comprehension seems to be preserved. Undoubtedly, also semantic knowledge plays a key role in reading comprehension; though, and to our knowledge, there are no studies clearly showing the relation between semantic knowledge and reading comprehension in aging. In the current study, we administered to younger adults and older adults a semantic working memory task, two word-span tasks and two reading comprehension tests (narrative and expository genre) to investigate the role of semantic knowledge during comprehension. In line with previous findings, we found that younger adults used flexibly either taxonomic or thematic knowledge, whereas the older adults mainly used thematic knowledge (better preserved from age-related decline). Originally, we found that in younger adults, thematic knowledge accounted for narrative text comprehension, whereas backward span performance accounted for expository text comprehension. On the contrary, in older adults no specific predictors were found for narrative text comprehension, whereas both thematic knowledge and education level were significant predictors of expository text comprehension. Results were discussed in the light of the possible protective role of some factors such as education level and mostly, as an instance of cognitive reserve exemplified by use of thematic knowledge as a residual ability.

Meta-Representational Skills in Bullying Roles: The Influence of Definitional Competence and Empathy

This study investigated the influence of meta-representational aspects on bullying. Meta-representation was operationalized in terms of the metalinguistic skill to produce conventional definitions, reflecting culturally shared representations and of the meta-level capacity to represent others' mental states underlying empathic disposition. One hundred and seventeen children, aged between 8;5 and 10;11 years, completed a definitional task and self-report questionnaires on bullying roles and empathic disposition. Descriptive, correlational, and regression analyses were performed. Results confirmed that hostile roles are negatively related to definitional competence and to empathic disposition. Lack of definitional competence was the main predictor (accounting for about 16% of variance), followed by empathy (explaining a further 6% of variance) of Primary School children's disposition to assume aggressive behaviors. These findings suggest that a lack of general meta-representational abilities may hinder the development of abstract and other-centered perspective taking, and compromise (compromising) social adjustment. This implies the need to work, particularly in school, on enhancing meta-representational and metalinguistic skills, such as the ability to recognize mental states and verbally make explicit cultural-semantic word meaning representations.

Sensitivity detection in memory recognition: interference control as index of taxonomic memory development?

We investigated how long-term memory modulates recognition accuracy performance in typically developing primary school children (aged 7 vs. 9 years). We devised a verbal working memory task where words associations were manipulated to obtain different types of semantic associations (i.e., taxonomic, thematic). Sensitivity detection measures were operationalised as difference between hits and false alarms (for both internal and external intrusions). As our main result, we found sensitivity detection for taxonomic associations was greater in older children than younger. In turn, this showed that taxonomies produce more interference in younger children, and thus, they are not able to take advantage from taxonomic associations, as older children do. These results are helpful in sketching a developmental trend of how semantic memory impacts recognition processes in memory.

[Formula: see text] Developmental dyslexia: How taxonomic and thematic organization affect working memory recall

Semantic long-term memory (LTM) representations can be distinguished in two main classes: taxonomic (i.e., abstract) and thematic (i.e., concrete, experiential). In typically developing children, taxonomies are usually acquired after thematic representations. In the current study, we investigated how LTM semantic representations modulate working memory (WM) recall in children with developmental dyslexia (DD). A sample of children with DD from primary and secondary school paired with a control group for age, gender, schooling, and IQ was administered a semantic WM (SWM) dual task. Here, children had to listen to groups of lists composed of words semantically related (taxonomic, e.g., shop- drugstore-coffee; or thematic, e.g., light-heat-fire) or arbitrarily related, and afterward to recall the last words among each group. Both taxonomic and thematic organizations supported recall in the two groups of children. More specifically, data showed that in typically developing children the taxonomic organization boosted WM recall (vs. the thematic one). On the contrary, in children with DD, the taxonomic organization did not better support recall and yielded effects similar to thematic organization. In children with DD, abstract taxonomic knowledge seems to be less frequently used than thematic knowledge. Findings contribute to sketch memory functioning across different memory systems in DD.

Developing behavioural indicators for intellectual functioning and adaptive behaviour for ICD-11 disorders of intellectual development

BACKGROUND

We present the work conducted to arrive at deriving behavioural indicators that could be used to guide clinical judgement in determining the presence and severity of deficits in intellectual functioning and adaptive behaviour for the purpose of making a diagnosis of disorders of intellectual development.

METHODS

An interdisciplinary expert panel provided guidance in developing behavioural indicators for intellectual functioning. A national dataset of adaptive behaviour on a sample of individuals with a diagnosis of intellectual disability was used to develop the behavioural indicators for the adaptive behaviour. The adaptive behaviour data were analysed using a cluster analysis procedure to define the different severity groupings by chronological age groups.

RESULTS

We present a series of tables containing behavioural indicators across the lifespan for intellectual functioning and adaptive behaviour, including conceptual, social and practical skills. These tables of behavioural indicators have been proposed for use in the clinical version of the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11) to be published by the World Health Organization.

CONCLUSIONS

The proposed behavioural indicators for disorders of ID described in the present article and to be included in the ICD-11 Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Guidelines are put forth to assist professionals in making an informed clinical decision regarding an individual's level of intellectual functioning and adaptive behaviour for the purpose of making a determination about the presence and severity of disorders of ID.

The lost children: The underdiagnosis of dyslexia in Italy. A cross-sectional national study

Background

Developmental dyslexia is one of the most common neurobehavioral disorders affecting children, but prevalence data on this condition are poor. The objective of the present study is to determine the prevalence of dyslexia in Italy in an unselected school population, using clearly defined diagnostic criteria and methods.

Methods

Cross-sectional study carried out in nine Italian Regions: two located in Northern Italy (Friuli Venezia Giulia and Veneto), three in Central Italy (Marche, Lazio and Umbria) and four in Southern Italy (Abruzzo, Molise, Puglia and Sardegna). Three consecutive levels of screening were carried out: the first two at school, to screen the population and identify children with suspect dyslexia; the last in centers with multi-professional staff specialized in learning disabilities to confirm the diagnosis. The key outcome measure is the prevalence of dyslexia, defined as the ratio between the number of children confirmed positive at the third level of screening and the total number of children enrolled in the study.

Results

We finally recruited 11094 children aged 8–10 years, of which 9964 constituted the final working sample after applying exclusion criteria and including only children who received parents’ consent to participate. The prevalence of dyslexia in the whole sample was 3.5% (95% CI 3.2–3.9%), with little differences between Northern, Central and Southern Italy (respectively 3.6%, 3.2% and 3.7%). In almost two out of three children with dyslexia the disorder had not been previously diagnosed.

Conclusions

This study confirms that in primary school children at the age of 8–10 years in Italy dyslexia is widely underestimated. Reliable data on dyslexia prevalence are needed to allocate necessary human and financial resources both to Health Services and Schools, ensuring timely support to children and families.

How taxonomic and thematic associations in semantic memory modulate recall in young through old-old adults

The aim of the current study was to investigate how the taxonomic and thematic organization of semantic long-term memory affected the recall performance of adults and older participants on a complex semantic working memory (SWM) task. Taxonomic and thematic classification are the two main systems used to organize knowledge: taxonomic information is hierarchically structured and typically independent of space and time, whereas thematically grouped concepts are horizontal and strictly context-dependent. Generally, thematic connections (more intuitive and experience-based) are formed earlier in development, while taxonomic links (more abstract and logic-based) are acquired later. We set out to explore whether this developmental pattern reverses with age, hypothesizing that the more complex form of memory organization (i.e., taxonomic) would play a lesser role in facilitating recall in the old, whereas thematic organization would be better preserved. Participants (aged 18 to 85 years) were asked to recall 60 words in sets of increasing span; the words were featured in lists organized to force a taxonomic association, a thematic association, or no semantic association. The results clearly showed that task accuracy varied more across age groups for taxonomically linked items than for thematically linked ones. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Cognitive stimulation therapy in the Italian context: its efficacy in cognitive and non-cognitive measures in older adults with dementia

OBJECTIVE

Cognitive stimulation therapy (CST) has been shown to have significant benefits in enhancing cognitive functioning and improving the quality of life of people with mild to moderate dementia. The present study examines the efficacy of the Italian version of the therapy (CST-IT).

METHODS

Older adults with mild to moderate dementia (n = 39) were randomly assigned to two programs: one group participated in the CST-IT, consisting of 14 sessions (twice a week for 7 weeks) and the active control group took part in alternative general activities. The outcome measures were cognitive functioning (measured by the Mini-Mental State Examination-MMSE-, the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment scale-cognitive subscale, the backward digit span test, and a narrative language test); quality of life (Quality of life--Alzheimer's Disease scale); mood (Cornell scale for depression in dementia and the social and emotional loneliness scale); functional activities in daily living (Disability Assessment for Dementia); and behavior (neuropsychiatric inventory).

RESULTS

After the intervention, only the CST-IT group maintained its MMSE score, while the control group displayed deterioration. The CST-IT group also performed better in some of the cognitive measures (Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive subscale and narrative language), mood measures (Cornell scale, social and emotional loneliness scale with a decrease in reported loneliness), and the Quality of life--Alzheimer's Disease scale. No other treatment effect was observed.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings confirm the efficacy, at least in the short term, of the CST in sustaining cognitive functions and perceived quality of life in older adults with dementia in the Italian care setting as well.

Vineland-II adaptive behavior profile of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or specific learning disorders

BACKGROUND

The evaluation of adaptive behavior is informative in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or specific learning disorders (SLD). However, the few investigations available have focused only on the gross level of domains of adaptive behavior.

AIMS

To investigate which item subsets of the Vineland-II can discriminate children with ADHD or SLD from peers with typical development.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

Student's t-tests, ROC analysis, logistic regression, and linear discriminant function analysis were used to compare 24 children with ADHD, 61 elementary students with SLD, and controls matched on age, sex, school level attended, and both parents' education level.

RESULTS

Several item subsets that address not only ADHD core symptoms, but also understanding in social context and development of interpersonal relationships, allowed discrimination of children with ADHD from controls. The combination of four item subsets (Listening and attending, Expressing complex ideas, Social communication, and Following instructions) classified children with ADHD with both sensitivity and specificity of 87.5%. Only Reading skills, Writing skills, and Time and dates discriminated children with SLD from controls.

CONCLUSIONS

Evaluation of Vineland-II scores at the level of item content categories is a useful procedure for an efficient clinical description.

Approximate additions and working memory in individuals with Down syndrome

There is some evidence that individuals with Down syndrome (DS) may have a poorer mathematical performance and a poorer working memory (WM) than typically developing (TD) children of the same mental age. In both typical and atypical individuals, different aspects of arithmetic and their relationships with WM have been largely studied, but the specific contribution of WM to the representation and elaboration of non-symbolic quantities has received little attention. The present study examined whether individuals with DS are as capable as TD children matched for fluid intelligence of estimating numerosity both of single sets and of added sets resulting when two sequentially presented sets are added together, also considering how these tasks related to verbal and visuospatial WM. Results showed that the DS group's performance was significantly worse than the TD group's in numerosity estimation involving one set, but not when estimating the numerosity resulting from the addition. Success in the addition task was related to success in the working memory tasks, but only for the group with DS; this applied especially to the visuospatial component, which (unlike the verbal component) was not impaired in the group with DS. It is concluded that the two numerosity tasks involve different processes. It is concluded that the arithmetical and working memory difficulties of individuals with DS are not general, and they can draw on their WM resources when estimating the numerosity of additions.

The relationship between emotional competence and hostile/prosocial behavior in Albanian preschoolers: An exploratory study

We explored the relationship between the ascribed tendency of Albanian preschoolers’ to take on prosocial and/or hostile roles and their empathy and emotion comprehension. Participants were 63 preschoolers (3- to 6-years-old) and six teachers. Pupils’ empathy and hostile/prosocial roles were assessed via teacher reports and their emotional comprehension through a non-verbal test. The results confirmed the pattern of relationships previously found in Italian preschoolers ( Belacchi & Farina, 2010 , 2012 ) among children’s roles in bullying, developmental stage of emotion comprehension, and empathic disposition. Differences emerged regarding Albanian teachers’ attributions of roles and empathic disposition as a function of gender; they also perceived children displaying hostile behavior as having strong perspective-taking abilities. This evaluation style may be culture-specific and related to the values of a society-in-transition such as Albania.

Implicit knowledge of grammatical gender in preschool children

The study aimed at investigating the role of nominal gender in animal categorization in preschoolers. Given the regularities characterizing gender system, at both syntactical and morphological level, Italian language is suitable to address this issue. In three experiments, participants were asked to classify pictures of animals as male or female. Half stimuli had names of feminine gender and half of masculine gender. In Experiment 1, Italian speaking adults and preschoolers classified animals according to the nominal gender. This effect was not found with English speaking participants (Experiment 2) but confirmed with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old Italian-speaking children (Experiment 3). These results showed an implicit knowledge of grammatical gender in preschoolers, suggesting that semantic processing may be modulated by linguistic information.

Feeling and thinking of others: affective and cognitive empathy and emotion comprehension in prosocial/hostile preschoolers

This study aims at investigating the affective and cognitive components of empathy in relation to both emotion comprehension and prosocial/hostile behaviors in preschoolers. A total of 219 children (54% boys; aged between 3 and 6: mean age 4.10) and 20 teachers (two for each class: group A and group B) took part in this research. Pupils' empathy and hostile/prosocial roles were assessed by teacher reports [Belacchi and Farina, 2010] and children's emotion comprehension by a nonverbal test [Test of Emotion Comprehension: Pons and Harris, 2000; adapted by Albanese and Molina; 2008]. As expected, the results showed a significant influence of gender, with girls being more empathic than boys, according to all of the teachers' perception. Contrary to our expectations, no systematic age influence emerged. Regarding the relations of children's emotion comprehension with both empathy measures and their prosocial/hostile attitudes, we have found: (1) a low significant relation with the total empathy measure, according to all the teachers, but with the cognitive empathy only according to teachers B; (2) a robust negative relationship of both affective and cognitive empathy with Hostile roles and with Outsider role, contrary to a positive correlation of only affective empathy with Prosocial roles. No relationships emerged between empathy measures and Victim role.

The influence of categorical organization on verbal working memory

The aim of this study was to show the positive effects of categorical organization on verbal working memory (WM), in a modified version of a double task, such as the Listening Span Test (LST) (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980). Two experiments were performed comparing sentences with the typical definitional format (i.e., superordinate term, copula, and specification) to sentences simply describing objects or events. The results of the two experiments, with participants from children aged 6 to adults, revealed that word recall was better in Categorical sentences than in Descriptive sentences and are interpreted in terms of retrieval facilitation, due to pre-existing organization in semantic memory, at least from the age of 8 onwards. Recall performance was also better with sentences giving True statements than those giving False statements. Furthermore, Categorical False sentences are more effective in enhancing recall than Descriptive False sentences since they violate well-established semantic expectations. Such variables were also found to act among participants with a lower WM span, by this confirming that pre-existing organized information may compensate for less efficient WM.

Prosocial/hostile roles and emotion comprehension in preschoolers

Bullying occurs at approximately the same rate in kindergarten as in elementary school, but few studies inquired into preschool years [Alsaker and Nägele, 2008; Stassen Berger, 2007]. This study aimed at: (1) verifying the presence in preschoolers of two additional participant roles (Consoler and Mediator), besides the six traditional roles detected by Salmivalli et al. [1996], grouped in four latent macroroles, by means of teacher report version of the Eight Participant Roles Questionnaire (PRQ) [Belacchi, 2008]; (2) linking prosocial and hostile behaviors to age and gender; and (3) investigating the relationship between roles and emotion understanding. Two hundred and nineteen children (54% boys; aged 3-6 years: mean age 4;10) were administered the Italian version of the Test of Emotion Comprehension [Albanese and Molina, 2008]; 20 teachers (2 for each class) filled in the questionnaire, attributing frequency scores on 24 items (3 for each role) to each pupil. A confirmatory analysis supported the fit of the hetero-report version of the Eight PRQ, revealing four macroroles: Hostile Roles (Bully, Reinforcer and Assistant), Prosocial Roles (Defender, Consoler, and Mediator), Victim, and Outsider. Satisfactory interteachers agreement not only confirms the macroroles hypothized, but also their expected distribution for gender and age. Moreover, the Prosocial roles presented a significant positive correlation with all subdimensions of emotion comprehension (External, Mental, and Reflective). The Victim and Outsider roles negatively correlated only with the External subdimension. The implications of these results for prevention and intervention purposes are discussed.

Difficulties in working memory updating in individuals with intellectual disability

BACKGROUND

Despite the critical role attributed to working memory (WM) updating for executive functions and fluid intelligence, no research has yet been carried out on its specific role in the vital case of fluid intelligence weakness, represented by individuals with intellectual disability (ID). Furthermore, the relationship between updating and other WM functions has not been considered in depth.

METHOD

The current study examines these areas by proposing a battery of WM tasks (varying in degree of active attentional control requested) and one updating task to groups of ID individuals and typically developing children, matched for fluid intelligence performance.

RESULTS

Comparison between the group of ID individuals and a group of children showed that, despite being matched on the Raven test, the updating measure significantly differentiated the groups as well as the WM complex span. Furthermore, updating proved to be the task with the greatest power in discriminating between groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results confirm the importance of the demand for active attentional control in explaining the role of WM in fluid intelligence performance, and in particular show that updating information in WM plays an important role in the distinction between typically developing children and ID individuals.

'To define means to say what you know about things': the development of definitional skills as metalinguistic acquisition

Some authors have suggested that definitional skills include metalinguistic components (Watson, 1985; Snow, 1990; McGhee-Bidlack, 1991). The present study therefore empirically investigated relations between the ability to define words and level of metalinguistic awareness in 280 Italian children (with ages ranging from 5 to 11 years) and in two groups of 40 adults each (with low and high educational levels, respectively). We used a definitional task presenting 24 terms (nouns, verbs, and adjectives, which were either concrete or abstract) and a task examining 6 different aspects of metalinguistic awareness. Our aim was to demonstrate that metalinguistic skills can positively predict the formal quality of definitions and to identify various aspects of metalinguistic skills that might be directly related to definitional skills. Results showed better performance on both tasks as a function of age and educational level; they also confirmed the important roles of metalinguistic ability and educational level in producing well-structured formal definitions.