Allophonic familiarity differentiates word representations in the brain of native speakers of regional linguistic varieties.

This study aims to shed light on the issue whether familiar allophonic variation is encoded in word representations. Both Italian speakers born in Trentino and speakers born in the Central-Southern regions of Italy took part in the experiment. We tested the MMN elicited by the same word encompassing two different allophones, one of which was more familiar to one group of participants than to the other, depending on their regional variety of Italian. The Trentino group showed an enhanced MMN for the word embedding the familiar variant while Central-Southern speakers showed no difference. The amplitude of the MMN for the unfamiliar word variant in Trentino speakers showed an inverse correlation with the passive exposure to the Trentino dialect. We conclude that words embedding familiar and unfamiliar allophones are differently represented in the brain of native speakers of regional language and the degree of differentiation is modulated by individual experience.

The Production of Clitic Pronouns: A Study on Bilingual and Monolingual Dyslexic Children.

Clitic production is reported to be challenging for impaired children, suffering from dyslexia or SLI, and for early second language learners too. On the contrary, research has not directly investigated the relation between dyslexia, bilingualism and clitic production. The aim of our study is that of addressing this topic, by analyzing the performance of 4 groups of children in a clitic elicitation task: 25 Italian monolingual dyslexic children (mean age 10;08 years old), 33 Italian monolingual typically developing children (9;99 years old), 25 bilingual dyslexic children with Italian as L2 (10;31 years old) and 31 bilingual typically developing children with Italian as L2 (10;30 years old). As inclusion criteria, bilingual children had at least 5 years of exposure to Italian, including 3 years of consecutive school attendance in Italy. Clitic production was assessed by means of an elicitation task in which the pronoun had to be produced either in the simple present or in the present perfect; higher difficulties were expected in this last condition, in which the clitic has to agree in gender and number with the past participle. Results revealed that dyslexic children, both monolingual and bilingual, performed worse than controls both in the simple present and in the present perfect, indicating that clitic production is challenging in dyslexia. As for the bilingual children, instead, differences were found between the two tasks. In the simple present, bilingual children performed very accurately and similarly to their monolingual peers, indicating that a target performance with clitics is accomplished by typically developing children with a longer exposure to Italian and suggesting that previously reported difficulties were related to linguistic immaturity and are likely to disappear as their L2 exposure and competence grow. In the present perfect, instead, both groups of bilinguals performed worse than their monolingual peers, suggesting that bilingualism could exacerbate the difficulties in the most challenging condition. Importantly, however, no negative effect of bilingualism in clitic production was found once controlling for the subjects' vocabulary, evidencing the importance of lexical competence in the target language for a native-like performance in clitic production.

Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children's performance in a nonword pluralization task.

In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the performance in a pluralization task of 52 Italian children divided into two groups: 24 children with developmental dyslexia (mean age 10.0 years old) and 28 typically developing children (mean age 9.11 years old). Our task, inspired by Berko's Wug Test, had the aim of testing the subjects' ability to apply pluralization rules to nonwords in the morphologically complex context of Italian nominal inflection. Results demonstrate that dyslexics display poorer morphological skills in comparison to controls, showing lower accuracy in the task. Furthermore, the dissimilar performances reported by the subjects in the different conditions indicate that the ability to inflect nonwords depends on factors such as the rule's productivity, frequency, and opacity with respect to gender. Finally, the children's performance in this task was significantly related to their reading proficiency, and it could predict accuracy in word reading independently of phonological awareness and working memory.