Activation of CI in the 2nd year of life may provide children who are deaf with a good opportunity to develop language skills, although some limitations in phonological and morphological skills are still present 3 years after auditory reafferentation.

CI may provide deaf children with a good opportunity to develop language skills, but severe difficulties in early social experiences and interaction mediated by language still remain. Delays in these aspects suggest that interventions improving pragmatic skills are recommended even on very young children with CI.

Data from 492 Italian infants (8-18 months) were collected with the parental questionnaire MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories to describe early actions and gestures (A-G) "vocabulary" and its relation with spoken vocabulary in both comprehension and production. A-G were more strongly correlated with word comprehension than word production. A clear developmental pattern for the different types of A-G was found. These findings are similar to those of different Western languages, indicating a common biological and cultural basis. The analysis of individual A-G and their relations with early words with a related meaning showed interesting similarities between the production of A-G with and without object manipulation and the comprehension and production of corresponding words. Results indicate that the transition from A-G to spoken language is mediated by word comprehension.

Background. Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is frequent in childhood and may have long-term sequelae. By employing an evidence-based approach, this scoping review aims at identifying (a) early predictors of DLD; (b) the optimal age range for the use of screening and diagnostic tools; (c) effective diagnostic tools in preschool children. Methods. We considered systematic reviews, meta-analyses, and primary observational studies with control groups on predictive, sensitivity and specificity values of screening and diagnostic tools and psycholinguistic measures for the assessment of DLD in preschool children. We identified 37 studies, consisting of 10 systematic reviews and 27 primary studies. Results. Delay in gesture production, receptive and/or expressive vocabulary, syntactic comprehension, or word combination up to 30 months emerged as early predictors of DLD, a family history of DLD appeared to be a major risk factor, and low socioeconomic status and environmental input were reported as risk factors with lower predictive power. Optimal time for screening is suggested between age 2 and 3, for diagnosis around age 4. Because of the high variability of sensitivity and specificity values, joint use of standardized and psycholinguistic measures is suggested to increase diagnostic accuracy. Conclusions. Monitoring risk situations and employing caregivers’ reports, clinical assessment and multiple linguistic measures are fundamental for an early identification of DLD and timely interventions.

Cognitive dysfunction involves 40-65 % of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. It can be detected in all MS phenotypes from the early stages of the disease, and it tends to progress over time. Minimal Assessment of Cognitive Function in MS (MACFIMS) has been proved to be the most sensitive and comprehensive battery available for MS cognitive assessment in the English population. In Italy, MACFIMS applicability is limited in everyday clinical practice since the overall validity of this battery in the Italian MS population has never been demonstrated. The aim of this study was to translate/cross-culturally adapt and validate an Italian version of the MACFIMS. A total of 130 MS patients and 60 healthy controls (HCs) were enrolled and evaluated with an Italian version of the MACFIMS. All tests discriminated MS patients from HCs; according to the literature, approximately more than half of MS patients (70.8 %) exhibit cognitive impairment. Principal component analysis showed four distinct components: visual-spatial memory/processing speed, working memory, executive functions and verbal memory. Our study is the first to validate an Italian version of the MACFIMS. Several aspects of validity have been demonstrated: criterion and, partially, construct. Future work will investigate the longitudinal course of neuropsychological dysfunction in Italian MS patients using these measures.

In 2 experiments we investigated attentional orienting to nonpredictive social and nonsocial cues in deaf observers. In Experiment 1a, 22 early deaf adults and 23 hearing controls performed a peripheral shape-discrimination task, while uninformative central gaze cues validly and invalidly cued the location of the target. As an adaptation to the lack of audition, we expected deaf adults to show a larger impact of gaze cuing on attentional orienting compared with hearing controls. However, contrary to our predictions, deaf participants did not respond faster to cued compared with uncued targets (gaze-cuing effect; GCE), and this behavior partly correlated with early sign language acquisition. Experiment 1b showed a reliable GCE in 13 hearing native signers, thus excluding a key role of early sign language acquisition in explaining the lack of GCE in the response times of deaf participants. To test whether the resistance to uninformative central cues extends to nonsocial cues, in Experiment 2 nonpredictive arrow cues were presented to 14 deaf and 14 hearing participants. Both groups of participants showed a comparable arrow-cuing effect. Together, our findings suggest that deafness may selectively limit attentional-orienting triggered by central irrelevant gaze cues. Possible implications for plasticity related to deafness are discussed.

One of the most popular and widely used parent report instruments for assessing early language acquisition is the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). This study compares normative data of the Italian Words and Sentences complete form (WS-CF) and short form (WS-SF). The samples included 752 children for the WS-CF and 816 children for the WS-SF designed for children aged 18–36 months. The concordance between WS-SF and WS-CF is analyzed in a subgroup of 65 children. The results revealed strong correlations between WS-CF and WS-SF in both lexical and grammar skills as well as strong relationship between lexical and grammar skills. There was a high percentage agreement (97%) between the two forms for scores below the 10th percentile, suggesting that the two forms may be used interchangeably in order to describe vocabulary and grammatical development.

In this study, we analyze semantic, grammatical, and frequency characteristics of the first words acquired by Italian children (Child's First Vocabulary, or CFV), drawn from the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI;Fenson et al., 1993). The CDI is an instrument for the collection of reliable information on early language development-that is, in the age range of 8-30 months. It is organized into two distinct questionnaires. The first, Gestures and Words (ages 8-16 months), is used for the collection of information on the comprehension and production of words and on the use of communicative gestures. The second questionnaire, Words and Phrases (ages 16-30 months), is used to collect information on word production and on grammatical, syntactic, and morphological competence. The questionnaires are compiled by parents on the basis of written instructions. The score for each child can be converted into a percentile score and compared with the scores of other children of the same age. This instrument has been translated and adapted for use with children of different cultures and languages.In preceding studies, in which norms for age of acquisition were derived from subjective estimates of adults, it was found that words acquired early have highly imageable referents and are very frequent in the written lexicon of children in primary school and in both the written and spoken lexicons of adults (for the case of Italian, see Barca, Burani, & Arduino, 2002). The main goal of the present study was to identify the imageability and frequency properties of the words in the CFV, and to assess whether the correlations that hold among the variables for these words acquired very early (before 30 months of age) are similar to the correlations that have been described for other word samples. The second goal was to verify if the CFV has the same proportions of nouns, verbs, and adjectives as are found in adult vocabulary. Finally, we compared the age of acquisition, imageability, and frequency characteristics of different grammatical categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). , new values of imageability are provided and values for age of acquisition, child written frequency, and adult written and spoken frequency are included. In this article, correlations among the variables are discussed and the words are grouped into grammatical categories. The results show that words acquired early have imageable referents, are frequently used in the texts read and written by elementary school children, and are frequent in adult written and spoken language. Nouns are acquired earlier and are more imageable than both verbs and adjectives. The composition in grammatical categories of the child's first vocabulary reflects the composition of adult vocabulary. The full set of these norms can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.