Word characteristics such as frequency, imageability, concreteness and length are considered good... more Word characteristics such as frequency, imageability, concreteness and length are considered good predictors of performance in lexical tasks like picture naming, word comprehension or lexical decision-making. There is also evidence that the age of acquisition (AoA) of words can partly explain aspects of word processing behaviour in later childhood and adulthood (Morrison et al., 1992; Brysbaert & Cortese, 2010).In the present study, we collected AoA norms for 158 nouns and 142 verbs in 22 languages: Afrikaans, British English, Catalan, Danish, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Irish, IsiXhosa, Italian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, South African English, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. In a preparatory picture naming procedure, adult native speakers of 34 languages were asked to name 508 object and 504 action pictures. Words shared among the target languages were retained for the final corpus. Our study followed the typical procedure for establishing AoA (see Morrison et al. 1997) and was performed on-line (see www.words-psych.org). 804 adult participants (at least 20 for each language) were asked to specify the age at which they learned the words in their native language. The vast majority of words were rated as acquired by the age of 7 years, demonstrating overlap in early vocabulary across diverse languages. Significant correlations between all language pairs point to a similar developmental sequence for the words under investigation. No previous study has compared AoA judgements on a shared set of words in a wide range of languages. 'The AoA data collected in the 22 languages provides word characteristics that should assist the design of cross-linguistic psycholinguistic experiments and the preparation of materials for use in the assessment and treatment of language disorders in preschool children. The AoA data are currently being used to control for AoA in the construction of cross-linguistic lexical tasks assessing word knowledge in monolingual and bilingual children
This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical asses... more This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of w...
The present study investigated the developmental processes which lead from a literal interpretati... more The present study investigated the developmental processes which lead from a literal interpretation of idiomatic expression to the ability of comprehending and producing them figuratively. A Model of the Development of Figurative Competence was presented according to which acquisition of idioms occurs as part of the general process of language and world knowledge development. Three experiments were carried out with second- and fourth-grade children, in which comprehension tasks - Recall, Multiple Choice, Paraphrase - and a production task - Completion - were employed. The results showed that younger children are more literally oriented than older children who in turn are more idiomatically oriented and that children of both age groups found it more difficult to produce idiomatic expressions than to comprehend them.
Previous research has shown that people attach a different value to exemplars of money having sim... more Previous research has shown that people attach a different value to exemplars of money having similar nominal values but dissimilar physical features. In particular, recent data have suggested that American people attach higher value to $1 banknotes than to $1 coins. These results have been explained in terms of familiarity since the $1 coin was introduced recently and is, therefore, less familiar than the $1 banknote. We suggest an alternative explanation based on the different mental accounts associated with the use of coins and banknotes. Experiments 1–3 show that people are willing to pay more when using coins than banknotes regardless of their familiarity with these exemplars of money. Experiment 3 also shows that people overestimate the amount of money at their disposal when they are provided with banknotes and underestimate it when using coins. Experiment 4 reveals that people using banknotes are more sensitive to discounts than people using coins. Finally, Experiment 5 indic...
ABSTRACT The aim of this work is to study the acquisition and development of the ability to co-or... more ABSTRACT The aim of this work is to study the acquisition and development of the ability to co-ordinate information in a written text. Fourth, 6th and 8th graders and undergraduates were assigned two conditions: they were presented with either two prose passages, describing two different peoples, or only one passage giving out the same information in a single text. The subjects read the passages and had to produce a text containing the comparison between the two peoples. The analysis of the texts produced by the subjects evidenced six different information integration levels. Two dependent variables were used: the highest level present in each protocol the percentage of level presence in each protocol. For both variables, data show a developmental trend: older subjects tend to use more complex levels. In the older subjects the highest and the most frequent levels coincide in most cases; in the other age groups a differentiation between these two variables is observed. The two conditions produce different results: subjects perform better when presented with the single text. Moreover the use of the levels in the two conditions depends on and interacts with age. The younger subjects are more sensitive to the difficulty degree of the task and, as age increases, the two tasks give rise to performances more similar to one another.
This paper presents the Italian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN)... more This paper presents the Italian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN), describes how it was developed and reports on some recent uses of MAIN within the Italian context. The Italian MAIN has been used in different research projects and for clinical purposes; results have been presented at conferences and in peer reviewed papers. The results indicate that MAIN is an appropriate assessment tool for evaluating children’s narrative competence, in production and comprehension from preschool age (5 years) to school age (8 years) in typical language development, bilingual development and language delay/disorders.
Conference paper, Sheffield, United Kingdom, University of Sheffield, PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association), July 2008, 2008
When a character is introduced in a narrative text, his/her aspect and personality are constructe... more When a character is introduced in a narrative text, his/her aspect and personality are constructed by the reader on the basis both of information found in the text and of inferences actively produced by the readers. The first perception of a character is likely to change in the course of reading, as the reader encounters new information and activates relevant inferences: this changes in the state of the mind are components of reading pleasure.
The type of the information given by the narrator depends on his/her priorities. Therefore, the reader receives information on the character and, at the same time, on the narrator's priorities. In the course of his/her act of reading, the reader activates, in his memory, material to be used in his concretization. In this way, s/he introduces new information; what is not explicitly described may be concretized differently by different readers. At the same time, the act of reading is very selective, removing information that is considered irrelevant. If the reader is then asked about information which has not been maintained in memory, s/he may be unable to recover it in full and may be forced to draw inferences that lead to results that are different from the text's surface.
In this paper we examine the way in which six characters are introduced in Italian novels by Gadda, Manzoni, Moravia, Svevo, Tarchetti and Vassalli. Participants were asked to read passages from the texts where the characters were presented for the first time and then summarize the passages and answer some questions. In our examination of the answers, every time we find information that was not given in the texts, we have evidence of material coming from the readers' inferences and world knowledge. This study shows how characters can be concretized differently by different readers, particularly in relation to gender and education.
According to a developmental model of figurative language acquisition--the global elaboration mod... more According to a developmental model of figurative language acquisition--the global elaboration model (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995)--the metalinguistic awareness necessary to use figurative language in a creative way is acquired late, and is subsequent to the ability to comprehend and produce figurative expressions. One hundred and eight children aged 9;6, one hundred and twenty-four children aged 11;3, one hundred and twelve adolescents aged 18;5 and one hundred adults participated in Experiment 1 which studied the development of metalinguistic awareness through an elicitation task. The subjects produced a high percentage of figurative expressions with a clear developmental trend that is concluded in adolescence. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that the production of comprehensible, appropriate and novel metaphors, as they were rated by adult judges, also increased with age. These results show that the ability to use figurative language in a creative and sensible way requires a long developmental time span and is strictly connected with the ability to reflect on language as a complex cognitive and interpersonal phenomenon.
Several studies have argued that children under the ages of nine or ten years rarely comprehend f... more Several studies have argued that children under the ages of nine or ten years rarely comprehend figurative language and therefore interpret it literally. Cacciari & Levorato (1989) showed that when idioms are presented within a rich informational environment, children are able to grasp the figurative sense at the age of seven, and also that children are less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them. In three experiments involving 264 children (whose age ranged from 6;9 to 11;9), we contrasted this global elaboration hypothesis with a partially alternative one, the acquisition via exposure hypothesis, according to which the frequency of exposure of children to idioms is the main factor explaining their acquisition and production. Results showed that familiarity (i.e. frequency of exposure) plays a minor role and only for children who are not yet able to use contextual information. Familiarity per se does not adequately explain how children acquire a figurative competence. A tentative model is proposed in order to account for figurative competence acquisition.
International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 2009
According to the 'Simple View of ... more According to the 'Simple View of Reading' (Hoover and Gough 1990), individual differences in reading comprehension are accounted for by decoding skills and listening comprehension, each of which makes a unique and specific contribution. The current research was aimed at testing the Simple View of Reading in individuals with Down's syndrome and comparing their profiles with typically developing first graders. Listening comprehension and the ability to read both words and non-words was compared in two groups with the same level of reading comprehension: 23 individuals with Down's syndrome aged between 11 years 3 months and 18 years 2 months and 23 first-grade typically developing children aged between 6 years 2 months and 7 years 4 months. The results indicate that at the same level of reading comprehension, individuals with Down's syndrome have less developed listening comprehension and more advanced word recognition than typically developing first graders. A comparison of the profiles of the two groups revealed that reading comprehension level was predicted by listening comprehension in both groups of participants and by word-reading skills only in typically developing children. The Simple View of Reading model is confirmed for individuals with Down's syndrome, although they do not show the reading profile of typically developing first graders; rather, they show an atypical profile similar to that of 'poor comprehenders' (Cain and Oakhill 2006). The crucial role of listening comprehension in Down's syndrome is also discussed with reference to the educational implications.
... L'integrazione di informazioni visive e verbali nel ricordo di storie in bambini di ... more ... L'integrazione di informazioni visive e verbali nel ricordo di storie in bambini di età prescolare e scolare. / The integration of visual and verbal information in story recall among preschool and school-aged children. Levorato, M. Chiara; de Zuani, Elisabetta. Giornale Italiano di ...
Word characteristics such as frequency, imageability, concreteness and length are considered good... more Word characteristics such as frequency, imageability, concreteness and length are considered good predictors of performance in lexical tasks like picture naming, word comprehension or lexical decision-making. There is also evidence that the age of acquisition (AoA) of words can partly explain aspects of word processing behaviour in later childhood and adulthood (Morrison et al., 1992; Brysbaert & Cortese, 2010).In the present study, we collected AoA norms for 158 nouns and 142 verbs in 22 languages: Afrikaans, British English, Catalan, Danish, Finnish, German, Hebrew, Irish, IsiXhosa, Italian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, South African English, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. In a preparatory picture naming procedure, adult native speakers of 34 languages were asked to name 508 object and 504 action pictures. Words shared among the target languages were retained for the final corpus. Our study followed the typical procedure for establishing AoA (see Morrison et al. 1997) and was performed on-line (see www.words-psych.org). 804 adult participants (at least 20 for each language) were asked to specify the age at which they learned the words in their native language. The vast majority of words were rated as acquired by the age of 7 years, demonstrating overlap in early vocabulary across diverse languages. Significant correlations between all language pairs point to a similar developmental sequence for the words under investigation. No previous study has compared AoA judgements on a shared set of words in a wide range of languages. 'The AoA data collected in the 22 languages provides word characteristics that should assist the design of cross-linguistic psycholinguistic experiments and the preparation of materials for use in the assessment and treatment of language disorders in preschool children. The AoA data are currently being used to control for AoA in the construction of cross-linguistic lexical tasks assessing word knowledge in monolingual and bilingual children
This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical asses... more This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of w...
The present study investigated the developmental processes which lead from a literal interpretati... more The present study investigated the developmental processes which lead from a literal interpretation of idiomatic expression to the ability of comprehending and producing them figuratively. A Model of the Development of Figurative Competence was presented according to which acquisition of idioms occurs as part of the general process of language and world knowledge development. Three experiments were carried out with second- and fourth-grade children, in which comprehension tasks - Recall, Multiple Choice, Paraphrase - and a production task - Completion - were employed. The results showed that younger children are more literally oriented than older children who in turn are more idiomatically oriented and that children of both age groups found it more difficult to produce idiomatic expressions than to comprehend them.
Previous research has shown that people attach a different value to exemplars of money having sim... more Previous research has shown that people attach a different value to exemplars of money having similar nominal values but dissimilar physical features. In particular, recent data have suggested that American people attach higher value to $1 banknotes than to $1 coins. These results have been explained in terms of familiarity since the $1 coin was introduced recently and is, therefore, less familiar than the $1 banknote. We suggest an alternative explanation based on the different mental accounts associated with the use of coins and banknotes. Experiments 1–3 show that people are willing to pay more when using coins than banknotes regardless of their familiarity with these exemplars of money. Experiment 3 also shows that people overestimate the amount of money at their disposal when they are provided with banknotes and underestimate it when using coins. Experiment 4 reveals that people using banknotes are more sensitive to discounts than people using coins. Finally, Experiment 5 indic...
ABSTRACT The aim of this work is to study the acquisition and development of the ability to co-or... more ABSTRACT The aim of this work is to study the acquisition and development of the ability to co-ordinate information in a written text. Fourth, 6th and 8th graders and undergraduates were assigned two conditions: they were presented with either two prose passages, describing two different peoples, or only one passage giving out the same information in a single text. The subjects read the passages and had to produce a text containing the comparison between the two peoples. The analysis of the texts produced by the subjects evidenced six different information integration levels. Two dependent variables were used: the highest level present in each protocol the percentage of level presence in each protocol. For both variables, data show a developmental trend: older subjects tend to use more complex levels. In the older subjects the highest and the most frequent levels coincide in most cases; in the other age groups a differentiation between these two variables is observed. The two conditions produce different results: subjects perform better when presented with the single text. Moreover the use of the levels in the two conditions depends on and interacts with age. The younger subjects are more sensitive to the difficulty degree of the task and, as age increases, the two tasks give rise to performances more similar to one another.
This paper presents the Italian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN)... more This paper presents the Italian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN), describes how it was developed and reports on some recent uses of MAIN within the Italian context. The Italian MAIN has been used in different research projects and for clinical purposes; results have been presented at conferences and in peer reviewed papers. The results indicate that MAIN is an appropriate assessment tool for evaluating children’s narrative competence, in production and comprehension from preschool age (5 years) to school age (8 years) in typical language development, bilingual development and language delay/disorders.
Conference paper, Sheffield, United Kingdom, University of Sheffield, PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association), July 2008, 2008
When a character is introduced in a narrative text, his/her aspect and personality are constructe... more When a character is introduced in a narrative text, his/her aspect and personality are constructed by the reader on the basis both of information found in the text and of inferences actively produced by the readers. The first perception of a character is likely to change in the course of reading, as the reader encounters new information and activates relevant inferences: this changes in the state of the mind are components of reading pleasure.
The type of the information given by the narrator depends on his/her priorities. Therefore, the reader receives information on the character and, at the same time, on the narrator's priorities. In the course of his/her act of reading, the reader activates, in his memory, material to be used in his concretization. In this way, s/he introduces new information; what is not explicitly described may be concretized differently by different readers. At the same time, the act of reading is very selective, removing information that is considered irrelevant. If the reader is then asked about information which has not been maintained in memory, s/he may be unable to recover it in full and may be forced to draw inferences that lead to results that are different from the text's surface.
In this paper we examine the way in which six characters are introduced in Italian novels by Gadda, Manzoni, Moravia, Svevo, Tarchetti and Vassalli. Participants were asked to read passages from the texts where the characters were presented for the first time and then summarize the passages and answer some questions. In our examination of the answers, every time we find information that was not given in the texts, we have evidence of material coming from the readers' inferences and world knowledge. This study shows how characters can be concretized differently by different readers, particularly in relation to gender and education.
According to a developmental model of figurative language acquisition--the global elaboration mod... more According to a developmental model of figurative language acquisition--the global elaboration model (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995)--the metalinguistic awareness necessary to use figurative language in a creative way is acquired late, and is subsequent to the ability to comprehend and produce figurative expressions. One hundred and eight children aged 9;6, one hundred and twenty-four children aged 11;3, one hundred and twelve adolescents aged 18;5 and one hundred adults participated in Experiment 1 which studied the development of metalinguistic awareness through an elicitation task. The subjects produced a high percentage of figurative expressions with a clear developmental trend that is concluded in adolescence. In addition, Experiment 2 showed that the production of comprehensible, appropriate and novel metaphors, as they were rated by adult judges, also increased with age. These results show that the ability to use figurative language in a creative and sensible way requires a long developmental time span and is strictly connected with the ability to reflect on language as a complex cognitive and interpersonal phenomenon.
Several studies have argued that children under the ages of nine or ten years rarely comprehend f... more Several studies have argued that children under the ages of nine or ten years rarely comprehend figurative language and therefore interpret it literally. Cacciari & Levorato (1989) showed that when idioms are presented within a rich informational environment, children are able to grasp the figurative sense at the age of seven, and also that children are less able to produce idioms than to comprehend them. In three experiments involving 264 children (whose age ranged from 6;9 to 11;9), we contrasted this global elaboration hypothesis with a partially alternative one, the acquisition via exposure hypothesis, according to which the frequency of exposure of children to idioms is the main factor explaining their acquisition and production. Results showed that familiarity (i.e. frequency of exposure) plays a minor role and only for children who are not yet able to use contextual information. Familiarity per se does not adequately explain how children acquire a figurative competence. A tentative model is proposed in order to account for figurative competence acquisition.
International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 2009
According to the 'Simple View of ... more According to the 'Simple View of Reading' (Hoover and Gough 1990), individual differences in reading comprehension are accounted for by decoding skills and listening comprehension, each of which makes a unique and specific contribution. The current research was aimed at testing the Simple View of Reading in individuals with Down's syndrome and comparing their profiles with typically developing first graders. Listening comprehension and the ability to read both words and non-words was compared in two groups with the same level of reading comprehension: 23 individuals with Down's syndrome aged between 11 years 3 months and 18 years 2 months and 23 first-grade typically developing children aged between 6 years 2 months and 7 years 4 months. The results indicate that at the same level of reading comprehension, individuals with Down's syndrome have less developed listening comprehension and more advanced word recognition than typically developing first graders. A comparison of the profiles of the two groups revealed that reading comprehension level was predicted by listening comprehension in both groups of participants and by word-reading skills only in typically developing children. The Simple View of Reading model is confirmed for individuals with Down's syndrome, although they do not show the reading profile of typically developing first graders; rather, they show an atypical profile similar to that of 'poor comprehenders' (Cain and Oakhill 2006). The crucial role of listening comprehension in Down's syndrome is also discussed with reference to the educational implications.
... L'integrazione di informazioni visive e verbali nel ricordo di storie in bambini di ... more ... L'integrazione di informazioni visive e verbali nel ricordo di storie in bambini di età prescolare e scolare. / The integration of visual and verbal information in story recall among preschool and school-aged children. Levorato, M. Chiara; de Zuani, Elisabetta. Giornale Italiano di ...
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Papers by Chiara Levorato
The type of the information given by the narrator depends on his/her priorities. Therefore, the reader receives information on the character and, at the same time, on the narrator's priorities. In the course of his/her act of reading, the reader activates, in his memory, material to be used in his concretization. In this way, s/he introduces new information; what is not explicitly described may be concretized differently by different readers. At the same time, the act of reading is very selective, removing information that is considered irrelevant. If the reader is then asked about information which has not been maintained in memory, s/he may be unable to recover it in full and may be forced to draw inferences that lead to results that are different from the text's surface.
In this paper we examine the way in which six characters are introduced in Italian novels by Gadda, Manzoni, Moravia, Svevo, Tarchetti and Vassalli. Participants were asked to read passages from the texts where the characters were presented for the first time and then summarize the passages and answer some questions. In our examination of the answers, every time we find information that was not given in the texts, we have evidence of material coming from the readers' inferences and world knowledge. This study shows how characters can be concretized differently by different readers, particularly in relation to gender and education.
The type of the information given by the narrator depends on his/her priorities. Therefore, the reader receives information on the character and, at the same time, on the narrator's priorities. In the course of his/her act of reading, the reader activates, in his memory, material to be used in his concretization. In this way, s/he introduces new information; what is not explicitly described may be concretized differently by different readers. At the same time, the act of reading is very selective, removing information that is considered irrelevant. If the reader is then asked about information which has not been maintained in memory, s/he may be unable to recover it in full and may be forced to draw inferences that lead to results that are different from the text's surface.
In this paper we examine the way in which six characters are introduced in Italian novels by Gadda, Manzoni, Moravia, Svevo, Tarchetti and Vassalli. Participants were asked to read passages from the texts where the characters were presented for the first time and then summarize the passages and answer some questions. In our examination of the answers, every time we find information that was not given in the texts, we have evidence of material coming from the readers' inferences and world knowledge. This study shows how characters can be concretized differently by different readers, particularly in relation to gender and education.