Publications by authors named "Fabio Trecca"
Objective: Maternal thyroid autoimmunity and thyroid function in early pregnancy may impact fetal neurodevelopment. We aimed to investigate how thyroid autoimmunity and thyroid function in early pregnancy were associated with language acquisition in offspring at 12-36 months of age.
Methods: This study was embedded in the prospective Odense child cohort.
Article Synopsis
- Language learning in natural environments includes various cues, but lab experiments often remove these real-world elements, using artificial languages instead.
- Three experiments tested how different types of feedback (deterministic, probabilistic, and mixed) influenced learners' abilities to grasp language-like patterns in an active guessing game.
- Results indicated that while learners could pick up on words without feedback, they only grasped the structural regularities of the language when feedback was provided, with positive feedback significantly enhancing their learning experience.
Article Synopsis
- Early childhood language development is linked to fetal brain maturation, and maternal cortisol levels during the third trimester may influence this process.
- A study with 1,093 mother-child pairs found that higher maternal cortisol was associated with better vocabulary development in boys and girls during specific age ranges.
- Girls had higher maternal cortisol levels than boys, and while high cortisol correlated with receptive vocabulary in girls, it positively impacted productive vocabulary in boys.
Background: Perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent chemicals used in everyday consumer products leading to ubiquitous human exposure. Findings of impaired neurodevelopment after prenatal exposure to PFAS are contradictory and few studies have assessed the impact of postnatal PFAS exposure. Language development is a good early marker of neurodevelopment but only few studies have investigated this outcome separately.
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- A study found that early vocabulary composition is a better predictor of children's sex/gender than vocabulary size, with data from 39,553 children learning 26 languages.
- Boys tended to use more words related to vehicles and outdoor activities, while girls used more words for clothing and body parts.
- The study highlights that vocabulary differences reflect the different experiences of children, which may influence their overall development.
Article Synopsis
- - The study explored how parenting self-efficacy affects child outcomes in preschoolers, focusing on a sample of 1,455 Danish parents, mostly mothers.
- - Results showed that higher parenting self-efficacy is linked to better child behavior, such as more prosocial actions and fewer behavioral issues like hyperactivity and emotional problems.
- - The findings indicated that psychological control negatively impacted child behavior, while inductive reasoning contributed positively to child development.
Prenatal exposure to pyrethroid and organophosphate insecticides and language development at age 20-36 months among children in the Odense Child Cohort.
Int J Hyg Environ Health
June 2021
Article Synopsis
- - The study analyzed the impact of maternal exposure to organophosphate and pyrethroid insecticides during pregnancy on children's language development at ages 20-36 months, using urine samples to measure metabolite levels.
- - Results showed high detection rates of the metabolites in urine samples, but overall, there were no significant associations found between these metabolites and the likelihood of delayed language development.
- - Interestingly, a reduced chance of scoring below average language scores was observed for boys in relation to higher levels of one pyrethroid metabolite (3-PBA) and for girls with certain organophosphate metabolites (TCPY and DE).
Research has suggested that Danish-learning children lag behind in early language acquisition. The phenomenon has been attributed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which features an unusually large number of non-consonantal sounds (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBisphenol A (BPA) is a non-persistent chemical with endocrine disrupting abilities widely used in a variety of consumer products. The fetal brain is particularly sensitive to chemical exposures due to its rapid growth and complexity. Some studies have reported associationbetween maternal BPA exposure and behavior but few have assessed impact on cognitive development, and to our knowledge no studies have specifically assessed the impact on language development.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Phthalates are a group of chemicals found in a variety of consumer products. They have anti-androgenic properties and human studies have reported associations between prenatal phthalate exposure and neuropsychological development in the offspring despite different cognitive tests, different ages and varying timing of exposure.
Objectives: To investigate the association between prenatal phthalate exposure and language development in children aged 20-36months.
Previous research has shown that Danish-learning children lag behind in early lexical acquisition compared with children learning a number of other languages. This delay has been ascribed to the opaque phonetic structure of Danish, which appears to have fewer reliable segmentation cues than other closely related languages. In support of this hypothesis, recent work has shown that the phonetic properties of Danish negatively affect online language processing in young Danish children.
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