Claudio Zmarich

This contribution provides new data on Italian first language acquisition and phonological development in preschool children. In total, 104 3- to 6;4-year-old typically developing Italian children were tested with two novel nonword tasks tackling the Italian consonantal system: one for repetition (NWR) and one for discrimination (NWD). NWR data were analyzed in terms of repetition accuracy, featural characteristics, and phonological processes, while NWD was analyzed according to signal detection theory (i.e., A-prime and d-prime) and in terms of discrimination accuracy. The results show the significant role of age on children’s repetition and discrimination abilities: as the children grow older, all the scores improve and the number of errors declines. No complete overlap is found between what children can produce and what they can discriminate, which is in line with what has already been documented in other languages. The findings contribute to the state of the art on the Italian language and provide new perspectives on some methodological issues specific to this language.

The purpose was to contribute to the validation of the TFPI, a new tool to assess the phonetic development of Italian-speaking children aged 18–47 months. Since currently norm-referenced instruments for Italian are lacking, the TFPI would fill this gap. We recruited 52 monolingual children aged 24–47 months with typical development. They were administered the complete TFPI, i.e., a naming task and repetition task; however, only their performances from the naming task were analyzed. The sessions were audio-recorded, in order to be later segmented and annotated in Praat, then manually transcribed with IPA. These data were then imported into Phon, an extremely suitable software for conducting analyses of phonological and speech data. We compiled the Phonetic Inventory (PhI) and calculated the Percentage of Consonants Correct (PCC) for each child, taking into consideration the allophones of Italian, in order to not compute them as errors. Both the PhI and the PCC improve with age, while intersubjective variability progressively decreases. Additionally, we investigated the age of the acquisition of each phone, since this domain lacks robust scientific data. Finally, our results align with previous findings, which proves the reliability and validity of the TFPI, and provides new information about the PCC, for which there are no reference values for the Italian language.

Objectives: The present work aims to contribute to the debate on the relationship between discrimination and production abilities in older pre-school-aged children and to fill a gap in the literature by providing evidence about this relationship in typically developing children speaking Italian, a language that is under-investigated. Methods: Two novel tests, an AX ‘same/different’ phonological discrimination test and a phonetic test, were administered to a sample of Italian pre-school children aged 72–78 months. Discrimination was tested at the feature and the syllable levels. Production was analyzed for consonant repertoire and the presence of phonological processes, such as devoicing or consonant cluster reduction. Results: In the AX test, significantly worse performance was found for syllables than for individual features. However, in production, no significant difference was found among phonological processes. No significant correlations were found between children’s performance in the two tests. Conclusion: The current data suggest that children’s discrimination and production abilities for speech are still developing after age 6. There is no complete overlap between what children produce and what they discriminate. The implications of these findings for theories of language development are discussed.