Prosocial Behavior in Preschoolers: Effects of Early Socialization Experiences With Peers.

Over the last decades, many studies had focused on the psychological outcomes of children who have received early socialization outside of the family context, highlighting that the daycare experience can both positively and negatively influence the child's social-emotional development. Despite the number of studies conducted, there is a lack of observational research on this topic. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the early daycare experience can influence the prosocial behaviors that children exhibit during free-play social interactions with peers, focusing on their quantity and quality.

Semantic Contingency of Maternal Verbal Input Directed at Very Preterm and Full-Term Children.

Several studies have testified to the importance of a responsive linguistic input for children's language acquisition and development. In particular, maternal use of expansions, imitations, interpretations, and labels has been shown to promote both children's language comprehension and production. From this perspective, the present study examined the semantically contingent linguistic input addressed to very preterm children's comparing it to that directed to full-term children observed during a semi-structured play session when the children were 24 months of age.

Mind-Mindedness and Parenting Stress: A Cross-Sectional Study in a Cohort of Mothers of 3-Month-Old Full-Term and Preterm Infants.

The preterm birth of a child is a sudden event that can disturb the overall family system and its functioning. Many studies have been conducted with the aim of exploring how and the degree to which this event affects the early mother-infant dyadic relationship and maternal well-being, with often mixed findings. The present study investigates the combined effect of preterm birth and parenting stress on mind-mindedness, a parenting dimension that captures how parents represent and treat their children as separate individuals with their own mental states and activities.

Mind-mindedness and parenting stress in mothers of preterm and full-term infants: The moderating role of perceived social support.

The goal of this study was to examine the effects of preterm birth and maternal childbirth-related posttraumatic stress and parenting stress on maternal mind-mindedness (MM). The study also investigated the effects of perceived social support on parenting stress and MM. Sixty-five preterm (N = 32) and full-term (N = 33) mother-infant dyads were observed at 6 months.

Can You Understand Your Child? Reliability and Validity of a Parent Questionnaire: The Intelligibility in Context Scale: Italian.

Introduction: The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) is a parent-report scale by which parents can rate their child's functional speech intelligibility according to seven different communicative partners. Translations, linguistic adaptations, and psychometric and norming data for ICS have been achieved in different languages.

Objective: To evaluate the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the ICS (ICS-I) in terms of internal consistency, test-retest reliability, criterion validity (correlation with speech measures), and construct validity, and to investigate potential differences between mothers' and fathers' subjective ratings in ICS-I.

Normative data and construct validity of a cross-linguistic functional speech outcome, the Intelligibility in Context Scale: Italian (ICS-I).

Objectives: The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) is a parent-report scale, world-wide translated and widely validated, by which parents can rate their child's functional speech intelligibility according to seven different communicative partners. The study aimed to report and discuss the normative data of the Italian version of ICS (ICS-I) in Italian-speaking preschool children, and to investigate whether the age influences the ICS-I scores (construct validity). Socio-economic status (SES) of the family were investigated and compared to parents' ratings on child's speech intelligibility.

Vocal and gestural productions of 24-month-old children with sex chromosome trisomies.

Background: Children with sex chromosome trisomies (SCT) frequently show problems in language development. However, a clear description of the communicative patterns of these children is still lacking.

Aims: To describe the first stages of language development in children with SCT in comparison with those in typically developing (TD) children.

Prosodic skills in children with Down syndrome and in typically developing children.

Background: Many studies have analysed language development in children with Down syndrome to understand better the nature of their linguistic delays and the reason why these delays, particularly those in the morphosyntactic area, seem greater than their cognitive impairment. However, the prosodic characteristics of language development in children with Down syndrome have been scarcely investigated.

Aims: To analyse the prosodic skills of children with Down syndrome in the production of multi-word utterances.

Gestural development and its relation to language acquisition in very preterm children.

This longitudinal study examined the development of communicative gesture in 16 preterm children and two groups of full term children at 12, 18 and 24 months of age. Children's spontaneous communicative gestures were analyzed during mother-child observation sessions. Preterm children's motor, mental and linguistic development were also measured.

Maternal speech to preterm infants during the first 2 years of life: stability and change.

Background: Studies on typical language development documented that mothers fine-tune their verbal input to children's advancing skills and development. Although premature birth has often been associated with delays in communicative and language development, studies investigating maternal language addressed to these children are still rare.

Aims: The principal aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate the maternal speech directed at very preterm children by examining its changes across time and the stability of maternal individual styles.

Characteristics of phonological development as a risk factor for language development in Italian-speaking pre-term children: A longitudinal study.

This study analysed the early linguistic development of Italian pre-term children. Samples of spontaneous pre-linguistic and verbal production were recorded at 12 and 18 months of age from two groups of children: 24 pre-term children and 15 full-term children. The Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates Questionnaire was administered at 24 months of age.