Number dissimilarities facilitate the comprehension of relative clauses in children with (Grammatical) Specific Language Impairment.

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.

Decision-making abilities in patients with frontal low-grade glioma.

Decisions in daily life are often quite complex, especially when one has to decide about his/her own health, as it is the case for patients with brain tumours. The integrity of the prefrontal cortex (and of the orbito-frontal in particular) is crucial in humans for practical decision-making. We investigated decision-making in 22 right-handed patients with a left frontal low-grade glioma, by means of a more complex, computerized version of the Iowa gambling task and we compared their performance with that of 26 neurologically-unimpaired subjects.

Racism and the empathy for pain on our skin.

Empathy is a critical function regulating human social life. In particular, empathy for pain is a source of deep emotional feelings and a strong trigger of pro-social behavior. We investigated the existence of a racial bias in the emotional reaction to other people's pain and its link with implicit racist biases.

Grammatical feature dissimilarities make relative clauses easier: A comprehension study with Italian children.

The Relativized Minimality approach to A'-dependencies (Friedmann et al., 2009) predicts that headed object relative clauses (RCs) and which-questions are the most difficult, due to the presence of a lexical restriction on both the subject and the object DP which creates intervention. We investigated comprehension of center-embedded headed object RCs with Italian children, where Number and Gender feature values on subject and object DPs are manipulated.

Heritable variations in gray matter concentration as a potential endophenotype for psychopathic traits.

Context: Genetic vulnerability to psychopathic traits is likely to also manifest at the neural level. We have recently reported increased gray matter concentration in several brain areas in boys with psychopathic traits.

Objective: To explore whether these gray matter concentration differences can be regarded as endophenotypes for psychopathic traits by (1) assessing their heritability and (2) examining the etiology of the co-occurrence of psychopathic traits and increased gray matter concentration.