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The article studies the manipulation of meanings between legal professionals and witnesses as it unfolds turn by turn in a hostile examination. Eleven hours of video-recording of the Italian criminal trial against Sergio Cusani were fully transcribed, resulting in 3700 turns of talk (1850 question turns and 1850 answers), which were analyzed on the basis of the conversational and discursive approach. Besides identifying the basic feature of the question and answers turns, our qualitative and quantitative data show how legal professionals and witnesses use different strategies to impose their own line of argument. In general, the more frequently the lawyers use a question the more it is coercive. Witnesses, on their side, prefer to provide elaborate answers. Moreover, the study provides evidence of the interconnection between the use of the strategies during the blame-implicative ‘thematic phases’ and the sequential organization of turns.

This comparative study aims at understanding which the difficulties children face in word segmentation in early writings. The term 'word' is both a metalinguistic and an everyday term. Rules about word separation have evolved over many years and are now normative in the languages these children are trying to write: Italian, Portuguese, Spanish. Children hesitate precisely at those places where historically there was also hesitation. They probably face similar difficulties with the conceptual definition of the 'word'. A total of 987 texts written by second- and third-grade children (7 to 9 years) were collected in Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Mexico and Uruguay, in a large number of different schools. The children were asked to write the story of Little Red Riding Hood, well known by children in those cultures. The normative view led to a quantitative analysis of 'deviations' from present language orthographies to give an overall picture of the situation. The interpretative attitude aimed at understanding chi...

For decades, research on children's literacy has been dominated by questions of how children learn to read. Especially among Anglophone scholars, cognitive and psycholinguistic research on reading has been the only approach to studying written language education. Echoing this, debates on methods of teaching children to read have long dominated the educational scene. This book presents an alternative view. In recent years, writing has emerged as a central aspect of becoming literate. Research in cognitive psychology has shown that writing is a highly complex activity involving a degree of planning unknown in everyday conversational uses of language. At the same time, developmental studies have revealed that when young children are asked to "write," they show a surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the representational constraints of alphabetic writing systems. They show this understanding long before they can read conventional writing on their own. The rich structure of meanings involved in the word text provided the glue that brought together a group of scholars from several disciplines in an international workshop held in Rome. Reflecting the state of the field at the time, the majority of the workshop participants were scholars working in languages other than English, especially the romance languages. Their work mirrors a linguistic and psychological research tradition that Anglophone scholars knew little of until recently. This volume provides English-language readers with updated versions of the papers presented at the meeting. The topics discussed at the workshop are represented in the chapters as follows: * the relationship between acquisition of language and familiarity with written texts; * the reciprocal "permeability" between spoken and written language; * the initial phases of text construction by children; and * the educational conditions that facilitate written language acquisition and writing practice.

Children's use of referential expressions is far from being firmly identified. The main objective of the study was to examine children's development between first and fifth grade in theuseof referential expressionsin oral and writtennarratives. Westudiedhow children maintain and reintroduce animate entities by employing different linguistic forms,looking attheinteractionbetweenlinguisticformsandfunctions.Asecondobjective was to analyse a new context of use, written narrative, and compareit to the oral one. The third aim was to compare the development of referential expressions in children of two Romance languages, Italian and Catalan. Results show that first grade children are already able to master the distinction between maintenance and reintroduction functions. On the other hand, even fifth grade children are not fully aware of possible referential ambiguities. Whereas no significant differences in managing the referential system emerged between the two languages, a few differences were found between o...

This paper analyses the concept of civilisation as it is constructed in anthropology and history, and uses the various dimensions so defined as a frame to understand how children grasp and make active use of the concepts in their interpretation of historical information. School fosters a notion of progress developing through different socio-historical forms which are understood as steps of a unique process. Such superordinate schemata of school history can preclude an understanding of 'otherness' deliberately situated within the other's perspective. The study investigates nine-year-old children's understanding and use of the notion of civilisation in the context of a historical task at school. Children were given a simplified version of a historical description of the Huns and were asked to take a stance about the Roman author's pejorative judgement of the Huns. Our analysis draws on the audio recordings of the small group and class group discussions. Data show the children's initial stereotyping reaction...

This study aims at understanding the use of punctuation in children’s early writings in connection with the organisation of the written text. Data are drawn from a larger comparative study in which written stories of Little Red Riding Hood were collected from primary school children who speak one of the three Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian). The corpus consists of 134 written stories of second grade children from low income families. Different quantitative and qualitative analysis are presented. Results show that all children, in spite of differences in literacy practices, try to make sense of the conventions of a system of writing, including punctuation marks (PMs). Some children seem to assume a ‘graphic principle’, while others make sophisticated attempts to distinguish the function of PMs for different types of speech genre. Contrastive textual use of PM seems to be critical also for teaching purposes. © 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Written texts produced by 10 Italian deaf native signers in four different writing tasks were analyzed. Data analysis focused on linguistic and orthographic nonstandard forms. The written production of deaf subjects with deaf parents (DD) was compared to the written production in two control groups: a group of 10 hearing subjects with deaf parents (HD) and a group of 10 subjects who have had no contact with deaf people or sign language (HH). The results duplicate findings from previous studies. Deaf subjects display a pattern of selective difficulty with Italian grammatical morphology, especially with free-standing function words. The four different writing tasks used in the present study yield results indicating that text type does influence our assessment of deaf writing abilities. A comparison of the texts written by deaf native signers with those of two hearing groups confirms the view that difficulties in the acquisition of written Italian are best explained by deafness itself, not by the influence of a previously acquired Sign Language, and that the specific difficulties with grammatical morphology displayed by our deaf subjects cannot be attributed solely to their limited experience with written Italian.

This study is part of a research project aimed at studying ways and effects of introducing computer use within a context of linguistic education. Linguistic activities, in which language was treated as an object instead of a means of communication, were carried out through a curriculum unit aimed at developing reflection on language. Within the curriculum a new software has been developed and implemented. The software promotes reflection on language and metalinguistic awareness in a social and educational context in wich «playing with language» is stimulated in children. It requires language comprehension and production, and offers to children (working in groups of three) the open task of composing sentences and stories in a problem solving setting. In this study we collected observational data on children’s interactions with the software and used the data as an ecological measure of children’s metalinguistic development. Positiv effects of the curriculum supported by the computer use were verified through measures of metalinguistic skills, investigated through individual interviews and administered also to a matched control group.

What has Little Red Riding Hood taught us about the writing of Italian children? The review of the studies conducted to date on the Italian sample has emphasized how early and effectively these children confront written language. Neglecting a strictly normative perspective and looking at the texts not only for how deviant they are, but also, and above all, for how correct they are, we could observe that children display early competence regarding both the writing system and the written language. The collected narrative texts in fact testify to an implicit and effective knowledge of the limitations of the graphic system among children, as well as to their precocious intention to produce written texts appropriate in form and register. In the framework of an approach that acknowledges the informative value of errors, the analysis of deviant output demonstrates the presence of regularities that reveal an internal logic in the texts.

The study aims at investigating the hypotheses that preliterate children work out, before the systematic teaching of writing, about the written representation of negation, absence, impossibility, and falsity. This problematic area has been previously investigated by Ferreiro (1981; 1997) and by Olson (1996). The present study focuses on a whole range of tasks concerning written representation, that were presented to 62 preliterate children, attending kindergarten and having an age between 4 yrs. 8 mth. and 6 yrs. 5 mth. The children were given a complex interview, including tasks that concerned children’s skill in representing negation, quantifiers and absence, and the written representation of impossible and false statements. Some of these tasks may create representational problems in children, since a contrast between reality and writing was purposively created. We expected a relationship between children’s writing development (that we measured independently) and their answers, at least in the two first tasks.

1. Studying writing and writing acquisition today: A multidisciplinary view 2. Part I: Writing and literacy acquisition: Links between linguistics and psycholinguistics 3. 1. On the relations between speech and writing (by Olson, David R.) 4. 2. The Unit of Written and Oral Language (by Blanche-Benveniste, Claire) 5. 3. The Word out of (Conceptual) Context (by Ferreiro, Emilia) 6. 4. Presschool Knowledge of Language: What Five year olds Know about Language Structue and Language Use (by Berman, Ruth A.) 7. 5. Explicit Word Segmentation and Writing in Hebrew and Spanish (by Tolchinsky, Liliana) 8. Part II: Writing and reading in time and culture 9. 6. Orality/ Literacy, Languages and Alphabets. Examples from Jewish Cultures (by Sirat, Colette) 10. 7. The Notion of Orthography. A Latin Inheritance (by Desbordes, Francoise) 11. 8. Aspects of a History of Written Language Processing. Examples from the Roman world and the early Middle Ages (by Guenther, Hartmut) 12. 9. Orality in Literate Cultures (by Koch, Peter) 13. 10. The Graphic Space of the School Exercise Books in France in the 19th-20th century (by Hebrard, Jean) 14. Part III: Written language competence in monolingual and bilingual contexts 15. 11. Production and Comprehension of Connectives in the Written Modality. A Study of Written French (by Fayol, Michel) 16. 12. Towards a Better Understanding of Biliteracy (by Luedi, Georges) 17. 13. Acquisition of Literacy by Immigrant Children (by Verhoeven, Ludo) 18. Part IV: Writing systems, brain structures and languages: a neurolinguistic view 19. 14. Domain-Specificity and Fractionability of Neuropsychological Processes in Literacy Acquisition (by Cossu, Giuseppe) 20. 15. Reading difficulties among English and German Children. Same Cause - Different Manifestation (by Wimmer, Heinz) 21. 16. Neural Organisation and Writing Systems (by Butterworth, Brian) 22. Bibliographic references 23. Analytic index

In this study we investigate the re-introduction of referents in the Frog stories told by Italian children aged 4–10 (N = 100). We found that for every age group full nouns are the most frequent forms used for reference re-introduction. Null forms, such as clitic pronouns or person/number inflection on the verb, are the second most frequent forms. A detailed analysis of null forms shows that children of different ages exploit different properties of the verbal and non-verbal context which can make a referent predictable. Compared to preschoolers, elementary school children are more likely to use null forms when the semantic content of the verb, or the structure of the preceding text make referents inferrable. On the other hand, preschoolers tend to exploit the importance of a character in the story plot, or the visual availability of the referent in the non-verbal context, as properties that make an entity salient enough to prevent the speaker from using overt linguistic forms such as full nouns. Our study confirms results of previous research, showing that elementary school children are more competent than preschoolers in integrating the semantic content of the current utterance into the context generated by previous discourse.

This study, part of a larger longitudinal research project, examined the process and products of story dictation of beginning readers. The subjects were 14 six-year-old Italian school children from low socioeconomic backgrounds who were interviewed four times (March, May, December and May of the following year) over a period of 16 months. In the interviews, the subjects were asked to construct and dictate a story in response to a picture stimulus, to reflect on their own stories, and to respond to questions from the scribes. The products (the stories) were analyzed for story structure elements, variety of verbal tenses, use of connectives, and anaphoric references. The processes (metatextual elements of interaction with the scribe) were analyzed according to variations in dictation speed, text segmentation, terminal signalling, and indications of revision. Results support an emergent literacy perspective, provide direction for further research, and are related to the needs of the early childhood curriculum.