Sleep Characteristics and Temperament in Preterm Children at Two Years of Age.

Study Objectives: We aimed to compare 2-year-old children born preterm with children born full term regarding: (1) sleep characteristics, (2) temperament, and (3) relations between sleep pattern and habits and temperament.

Methods: The study included 51 preterm children with normal cognitive, language, and motor development (mean = 20.94 months, standard deviation [SD] = 4.

Feature binding and the processing of global-local shapes in bilingual and monolingual children.

In the present study, we examined the effects of bilingualism and age on a color-shape binding task (assessing visual working memory) and a global-local task (assessing inhibitory processes) in a sample of 55 bilingual and 49 monolingual children 8 and 10 years old. In the color-shape binding task, corrected recognition scores increased in older children; bilingual children performed better than monolinguals in the shape-only condition, but the two groups were equally accurate in the color-only and combination conditions. In the global-local task, accuracy was higher in bilingual than in monolingual children, particularly on incongruent trials; monolingual children showed a strong global precedence effect (higher accuracy in the global than in the local conditions and greater global-to-local interference), whereas bilingual children exhibited a small, but significant, local precedence effect (higher accuracy in the local than in the global conditions and greater local-to-global interference).

Sentence repetition as a measure of early grammatical development in Italian.

Background: Research on language acquisition and disorders highlights the need to evaluate the early phases of language development for the early identification of children with language problems (screening), and to determine the nature and severity of language disorders (diagnosis).

Aims: The paper presents a new Sentence Repetition Task developed for evaluating language abilities in Italian pre-schoolers. Two studies are reported.

A crosslinguistic study of the relationship between grammar and lexical development.

The relationship between grammatical and lexical development was compared in 233 English and 233 Italian children aged between 1;6 and 2;6, matched for age, gender, and vocabulary size on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Four different measures of Mean Length of Utterance were applied to the three longest utterances reported by parents, and to corrected/expanded versions representing the 'target' for each utterance. Italians had longer MLUs on most measures, but the ratio of actual to target MLUs did not differ between languages.

Timed action and object naming.

Factors affecting object and action naming were compared in a timed picture-naming paradigm, for drawings of 520 objects and 275 actions, named by adult native speakers of English. Massive differences between object and action naming were observed for all dependent variables, and theoretically relevant differences emerged in the variables that predict retrieval of nouns vs. verbs in this task.