Giulia Vettori

The paper presents the results of monoaural and binaural acoustic measurements and speech-intelligibility tests conducted in two classrooms representative of typical school buildings in Italy. The sample of two classrooms was selected based on a statistical analysis of reverberation time measurements taken in more than one hundred Italian schools. In the two sample classrooms, measurements were taken both when the room was empty and when it was occupied by pupils. The binaural measurements were conducted on two students who were fitted with special headphones equipped with binaural microphones, with sound sources placed in various positions within the classroom, both in the acoustically untreated classroom (with a long reverberation time) and in the acoustically treated classroom (with a short reverberation time). The results of the speech intelligibility tests conducted on 25 elementary school students confirmed that speech intelligibility improves significantly in the acoustically treated classroom.

1. In the present-day society, learners turn to the Web to encounter the information they need to complete school tasks (OECD, 2019). Whether it is for a school project, to complement the study of ...

The paper presents the results of monoaural and binaural acoustic measurements and speech intelligibility tests conducted in two classrooms representative of typical school buildings in Italy. The sample of two classrooms was selected based on a statistical analysis of reverberation time measurements taken in more than one hundred Italian schools. In the two sample classrooms, measurements were taken both when the room was empty and when it was occupied by pupils. The binaural measurements were conducted on two students who were fitted with special headphones equipped with binaural microphones, with sound sources placed in various positions within the classroom, both in the acoustically untreated classroom (with a long reverberation time) and in the acoustically treated classroom (with a short reverberation time). The results of the speech intelligibility tests conducted on 25 elementary school students confirmed that speech intelligibility improves significantly in the acoustically treated classroom.

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This pilot study examined the effects of Italian/English bilingual education on cognitive development. Specifically, it investigated whether biliteracy—the ability to read and write in two languages—offers new insight into the relationship between language and cognition, and whether it supports specific cognitive advantages. Design/Methodology/Approach: Twenty-six children aged 9 to 10 were tested across two groups: one attending a bilingual Italian/English school in London, UK, and the other a monolingual Italian state school in Florence, Italy. Participants completed a battery of verbal and non-verbal tasks targeting executive functions: inhibitory control, working memory, reasoning, and verbal fluency. Data and Analysis: Children’s performance was compared using group-level contrasts across accuracy and response time. Descriptive trends and task-specific outcomes were examined to identify potential cognitive differences. Findings/Conclusions: Overall, the two groups performed similarly across most tasks. However, children in the bilingual program showed higher accuracy and faster response times in a task assessing inhibitory control and monitoring. They also performed more accurately—though more slowly—on a reasoning task, suggesting more deliberate and effective problem-solving strategies. Originality: This is among the first studies to explore biliteracy and cognition through a cross-national, matched-sample design with Italian/English bilingual children. It contributes to a growing evidence base on the cognitive outcomes of bilingual education. Significance/Implications: Findings suggest that bilingual education fostering biliteracy may enhance core executive functions relevant to academic learning. The results highlight the need for further research, including larger-scale and longitudinal studies focused on biliterate populations.

In this study, we investigated primary school children’s perspectives on their hearing and listening in classrooms with different acoustic quality levels. The sample included 213 children. The children completed a self-report questionnaire rating how well they could hear and listen in various situations in classrooms with two different acoustic conditions: Poor acoustic quality (long reverberation time [Long RT]) versus Adequate acoustic quality (short reverberation time [Short RT]) equipped with a sound-absorbing system. The results showed that auditory perception in the two conditions depends on the child’s age, with only fourth- and fifth-grade children reporting benefits from classroom acoustic correction. Our study provides preliminary results on children’s perspectives regarding their hearing and listening experiences during school learning, drawing out the implications for the design and implementation of school metacognitive interventions aimed at improving children’s and teachers’ awareness of motivational-affective, regulative, and environmental aspects favoring listening at school.

This systematic review addressed the following question: Which are the relations between L1 and/or L2 foundational and upper-level language skills, cognitive skills, high-order cognitive and self-regulation factors and L2-English reading comprehension skills in 11-to-19 year EFL secondary school students with different L1 language profiles? Following preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses guidelines, twenty-seven studies were included for a systematic synthesis of results in the light of the different grades of “family language distance” between L1 and L2-English (i.e., “close related” vs. “partially related” vs. “not related”). We found that several L1 and L2 language skills (e.g., vocabulary, morphological awareness), cognitive skills (e.g., working memory) and high-order factors as metacognitive knowledge were positively associated with L2-English reading comprehension, regardless of different language groups. Conversely, we found that several well-known predictors of text comprehension are neglected in the scientific literature on reading in L2. We discuss practical implications and key recommendations to support school and future research.

This study investigates the emergence of sound-sign correspondence in Italian-speaking 5-year-old pre-schoolers. There are few experimental studies on the precursors of reading and writing skills and those existing mainly focus on letter knowledge or logographic processing of words in pre-schoolers. This paper evaluates and compares 5-year-old children’s use of the logographic processing or the use of sound-sign processing to decode target words in original and modified versions. Furthermore, we verify whether pre-schoolers’ type of reading words (logographic versus sound-sign processing) vary in accordance with children’s socio-cultural differences (i.e., type of school and socio-cultural information from parents). This study tested 94 children (M-age = 5 years and 8 months) at the end of the last year of preschool. Six stimulus logos were used to evaluate children’s ability to decode words and the type of decoding (logographic or sound-sign processing). The Chi-square results confirm that the achievement of the correspondence between sound-sign at the base of reading and writing has already started in preschool. Our findings shed light on a significant proportion of pre-schoolers who can already read words via sound-sign processing or show the emergence of notational awareness, while the others still rely on logographic processing. Moreover, the results show that pre-schoolers’ notational awareness is related to socio-cultural characteristics pertaining to schools and families. These findings suggest that 5 years is an important age for the disentanglement between logographic and sound-sign correspondence in pre-schoolers and provide useful implications for theory and practice.