Narrative skills and language comprehension in preschool children with cochlear implants: A comparison with children with Developmental Language Disorder or typical development.

Introduction: The narrative skills of children with cochlear implants (CIs) are fragile, but the factors at play and whether these difficulties could be similar to those detected in language impairment are not clear. The present study aims to assess, at the microstructural level, narrative skills, comparing children with CIs with children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or Typical Development (TD). Furthermore, the relationship between verbal (lexical and morphosyntactic) comprehension and narrative skills across groups is investigated.

Preterm infant contingent communication in the neonatal intensive care unit with mothers versus fathers.

Very few studies have assessed infant capacity for bidirectional, contingent communication at birth, and to our knowledge there are none with preterm infants in the neonatal period. Presence versus absence of such interactive contingency makes a difference for our theories of development. We examined whether preterm infants can contingently coordinate behaviors with mothers and fathers in spontaneous communication in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), and whether mother-infant versus father-infant engagement and contingency differ.

Do motor skills impact on language development between 18 and 30 months of age?

Despite recent evidence on the relation between motor development and language development in infancy, this relation is still little explored in the late second and third year. This study investigated whether gross and/or fine motor skills affect language outcomes in this age range and whether any such effects narrow over time to specific language categories related to motor experience, such as spatial vocabulary. Thirty-six Italian monolingual toddlers (58% girls) participated, divided into two groups based on their age.

Fathers' experiences of supporting their partners during their preterm infant's stay in the neonatal intensive care unit: a multi-method study.

Objective: To explore how the fathers experience their role as a support for their partner and the relationship with them during their preterm infant's stay in the NICU.

Study Design: Multi-method longitudinal study involving ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews, self-report questionnaires, and clinical information. Twenty fathers of preterm infants hospitalized in a level-III-NICU were included.

Do Acoustic Environment Characteristics Affect the Lexical Development of Children With Cochlear Implants? A Longitudinal Study Before and After Cochlear Implant Activation.

Purpose This study investigates the acoustic environment of children with cochlear implants (CIs) and the relationship between exposure to speech, in noise and in quiet, and the children's lexical production up to 1 year after CI activation, while controlling for the effect of early individual differences in receptive vocabulary growth. Method Eighteen children with CIs were observed at 3, 6, and 12 months after CI activation. Children's spontaneous word production during interaction with their mothers (types and tokens) and their expressive and receptive vocabulary size were considered.