Publications by authors named "Giulia Mornati"

We investigated online early comprehension in Italian children aged 12 and 20 months, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic features (i.e., gender) carried by determiners in facilitating comprehension and anticipating upcoming words.

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Previous research found that the parental autism phenotype is associated with child autism spectrum disorder (ASD), even if the pathway between autistic traits in parents and child ASD is still largely unknown. Several studies investigated frontal asymmetry in alpha oscillation (FAA) as an early marker for ASD. However, no study has examined the mediational effect of FAA between parental autistic traits and child ASD symptoms in the general population.

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Background: The predictable path to child language acquisition is largely constrained by both brain maturation and environmental experience. The synchronized activity of large numbers of neurons gives rise to macroscopic brain oscillations on an electroencephalogram (EEG). It has been found that neural oscillations at rest in the gamma frequency band (25-45 Hz) are associated with development of different cognitive systems, including language.

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In a community-based sample of 104 infants and their mothers, we hypothesized a pathway from postnatal maternal symptoms of depression to child emotion dysregulation, and tested at 6 months of age the mediation role of alpha asymmetry at frontal and parietal sites. We recorded infant resting-state EEG at 6 months of age. Child emotion dysregulation was measured at 24 months by the Child Behavior Checklist Dysregulation Profile derived from the CBCL 1½-5.

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Prism adaptation (PA) is a technique that induces a temporary change of the alignment between different reference frames. This technique has been shown to reduce many signs of unilateral spatial neglect (USN). Two procedures of prism adaptation have been used.

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Article Synopsis
  • Early identification of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is essential for creating effective intervention strategies, especially since language deficits are common in both ASD and language impairment (LI).
  • This study compares auditory processing in infants at risk for ASD (HR-ASD) and those at risk for LI (HR-LI) using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to identify specific markers that may predict later language and ASD outcomes.
  • Findings indicate that both HR-ASD and HR-LI infants showed delayed auditory processing compared to controls, but only HR-ASD infants had larger P3 amplitudes, suggesting that ERP measures could help distinguish between ASD and LI and provide insight into their underlying mechanisms.
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Children begin to establish lexical-semantic representations during their first year of life, resulting in a rapid growth of vocabulary around 18-24 months of age. The neural mechanisms underlying this initial ability to map words onto conceptual representations remain relatively unknown. In the present study, the electrophysiological underpinnings of these mechanisms are explored during the critical phase of lexical acquisition using a picture-word matching paradigm.

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