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A follow-up study on Italian late talkers: Development of language, short-term memory, phonological awareness, impulsiveness, and attention

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2007

LAURA D'ODORICO ,
ALESSANDRA ASSANELLI ,
FABIA FRANCO  and
VALENTINA JACOB
LAURA D'ODORICO
Affiliation:
University of Milan–Bicocca, Italy
ALESSANDRA ASSANELLI
Affiliation:
University of Milan–Bicocca, Italy
FABIA FRANCO
Affiliation:
Middlesex University, UK
VALENTINA JACOB
Affiliation:
University of Padua, Italy
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Abstract

This follow-up study compares cognitive and language aspects of a group of Italian children ages 4–6 years, who had shown delayed expressive language abilities at 24 months of age (late talkers), with those of a group of children with a history of normal expressive language development (average talkers). Children were given a battery of cognitive–neuropsychological tests to assess grammatical comprehension, vocabulary development, verbal short-term memory, phonological awareness, planning and visuomotor coordination, and attention and impulsiveness. No differences were found in the results between the two groups in the domains of attention, impulsiveness, and visuomotor planning, but in the domain of syntactic competence late talkers developed particular difficulties in the comprehension of passive negative sentences compared to average talkers. Late talkers also performed significantly worse on the nonword repetition task, which measures abilities closely connected with verbal short-term memory and phonological awareness.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , January 2007 , pp. 157 - 169
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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