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In two studies, we used the Gottschaldt's Hidden Figure Test (GHFT) for assessing figure disembedding ability in children aged 7-11. Study 1 demonstrated in a large sample of typically developing children that GHFT accuracy and time scores differed across age groups, without sex and socioeconomic differences. Thus, we provided normative data only taking into account children's age. In Study 2, GHFT normative values were used to assess children with autism, who were also compared with a closely age-matched group of typical controls. Children with autism achieved time scores at or above the 50th centile and significantly differed from the controls for time score. The GHFT seems a valuable tool for defining the cognitive profile of children with autism.

In two studies, we used the Gottschaldt's Hidden Figure Test (GHFT) for assessing figure disembedding ability in children aged 7-11. Study 1 demonstrated in a large sample of typically developing children that GHFT accuracy and time scores differed across age groups, without sex and socioeconomic differences. Thus, we provided normative data only taking into account children's age. In Study 2, GHFT normative values were used to assess children with autism, who were also compared with a closely age-matched group of typical controls. Children with autism achieved time scores at or above the 50th centile and significantly differed from the controls for time score. The GHFT seems a valuable tool for defining the cognitive profile of children with autism., Author(s): Massimiliano Conson [sup.1] [sup.6] , Mattia Siciliano [sup.1] [sup.2] , Luigi Trojano [sup.1] , Pierluigi Zoccolotti [sup.3] [sup.4] , Isa Zappullo [sup.1] , Chiara Baiano [sup.1] , Giovanni Caputo [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the mental health of those who survived the illness but underwent long treatment and hospitalization. Much research has highlighted signs of emotional distress in those who experienced intensive care, and the procedures implemented to fight the infection. The present study investigated the effects of the illness experience in 40 subjects admitted to a rehabilitation unit after discharge from intensive care by focusing on the possibility of differences in emotional well-being depending on the type of ventilation. The results of the administration of psychological scales for anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder showed that many subjects experienced some form of emotional distress. There were no differences between patients who underwent invasive ventilation and those who did not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italian developmental dyslexic readers show a striking length effect and have been hypothesised to rely mostly on nonlexical reading. Our experiments tested this hypothesis by assessing whether or not the deficit underlying dyslexia is specific to lexical reading. The effects of lexicality, word frequency and length were investigated in the same group of children in four separate experiments. Although dyslexics were slower and less accurate than skilled readers and had large length effects, they showed lexicality and word frequency effects in both reading aloud and lexical decision. In a cross-experiment comparison, we show that a single global factor explains a large proportion of the difference in reading performance between dyslexic and skilled readers. This factor may indicate a deficit at a prelexical level of analysis. Lexical activation seemed spared in the dyslexic children based on the effects of lexicality and frequency. These findings contrast the hypothesis that Italian dyslexics primarily engage in nonlexical reading. (Contains 5 figures and 3 tables.)

This study analyzed the efficacy of EEG resting state and neuropsychological performances in discriminating patients with different forms of dementia, or mild cognitive impairment (MCI), compared with control subjects. Forty-four patients with dementia (nineteen patients with AD, and seven with FTD), eighteen with MCI, and nineteen healthy subjects, matched for age and gender, underwent an extensive neuropsychological test battery and an EEG resting state recording. Results showed greater theta activation in posterior areas in the Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Fronto-Temporal Dementia (FTD) groups compared with the MCI and control groups. AD patients also showed more delta band activity in the temporal-occipital areas than controls and MCI patients. By contrast, the alpha and beta bands did not discriminate among groups. A hierarchical clustering analysis based on neuropsychological and EEG data yielded a three-factor solution. The clusters differed for several neuropsychological measures, as well as for beta and theta bands. Neuropsychological tests were most sensitive in capturing an initial cognitive decline, while increased theta activity was uniquely associated with a substantial worsening of the clinical picture, representing a negative prognostic factor. In line with the Research Domains Framework (RDoC) perspective, the joint use of cognitive and neurophysiological data may provide converging evidence to document the evolution of cognitive skills in at-risk individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzed the spelling skills of Italian children as a function of school experience. We examined the writing performances of 465 first- to eighth-grade normal readers on a spelling test that included regular words, context-sensitive regular words, words with ambiguous transcription, and regular pseudowords. Based on the dual-route model (DRM), the regularity and orthographic complexity effects were considered to probe sublexical processing while the lexicality effect was taken to mark lexical processing. The analysis of spelling performances indicated that, among Italian children, both lexical and sublexical procedures are available since the first year of schooling. However, the two procedures showed different developmental trends. The DRM appears as a useful theoretical framework to describe the development of spelling in a relatively regular language such as Italian.

Although developmental dyslexia is often referred to as a cross-modal disturbance, tests of different modalities using the same stimuli are lacking. We compared the performance of 23 children with dyslexia and 42 chronologically matched control readers on reading versus repetition tasks and visual versus auditory lexical decision using the same stimuli. With respect to control readers, children with dyslexia were impaired only on stimuli in the visual modality; they had no deficit on the repetition and auditory lexical decision tasks. By applying the rate-amount model (Faust et al., 1999), we showed that performance of children with dyslexia on visual (but not auditory) tasks was associated with that of control readers by a linear relationship (with a 1.78 slope), suggesting that a global factor accounts for visual (but not auditory) task performance. We conclude that the processing of linguistic stimuli in the visual and auditory modalities is carried out by independent processes and that dyslexic children have a selective deficit in the visual modality. (Contains 3 figures and 2 tables.)

Stress assignment to Italian polysyllabic words is unpredictable, because stress is neither marked nor predicted by rule. Stress assignment, especially to low frequency words, has been reported to be a function of stress dominance and stress neighbourhood. Two experiments investigate stress assignment in sixth-grade, skilled and dyslexic, readers. In Experiment 1, skilled readers were not affected by stress dominance. Dyslexic children, although affected by word frequency, made more stress regularisation errors on low frequency words. In Experiment 2, stress neighbourhood affected low frequency word reading irrespective of stress dominance for both skilled and dyslexic readers. Words with many stress friends were read more accurately than words with many stress enemies. It is concluded that, in assigning stress, typically developing and developmental dyslexic Italian readers are sensitive to the distributional properties of the language.

The study explored the different influences of roots and suffixes in reading aloud morphemic pseudowords (e.g., vetr-ezza, "glass-ness"). Previous work on adults showed a facilitating effect of both roots and suffixes on naming times. In the present study, pseudoword stimuli including roots and suffixes in different combinations were administered to sixth-grade children with dyslexia (N=22) and skilled readers (N=44), matched for chronological age. Indeed, the sequential reading strategy of less proficient readers (particularly for pseudowords) should favour the emergence of differences between left and right constituents (root and suffix, respectively) in reading performance. Results showed that for both children with dyslexia and skilled young readers the onset of pronunciation depended exclusively on roots, while there was no significant effect of suffixes. However, both roots "and" suffixes led to higher levels of accuracy than matched orthographic strings of letters. Posthoc regression analyses confirmed the morphological nature of the root and suffix effects, over and above the effects of the frequency of their orthographic patterns. Results indicate that the position of the reading units within the letter string, as well as their differential effects on latencies and accuracy, should be taken into account by models of morphological processing in word recognition and reading and by applied intervention research. (Contains 7 tables.)

A previous study reported that, similar to young and adult skilled readers, Italian developmental dyslexics read pseudowords made up of a root and a derivational suffix faster and more accurately than simple pseudowords. Unlike skilled readers, only dyslexic and reading-matched younger children benefited from morphological structure in reading words aloud. In this study, we show that word frequency affects the probability of morpheme-based reading, interacting with reading ability. Young skilled readers named low- but not high-frequency morphologically complex words faster than simple words. By contrast, the advantage for morphologically complex words was present in poor readers irrespective of word frequency. Adult readers showed no facilitating effect of morphological structure. These results indicate that young readers use reading units (morphemes) that are larger than the single-grapheme grain size. It is argued that morpheme-based reading is important for obtaining reading fluency (rather than accuracy) in transparent orthographies and is useful particularly in children with limited reading ability who do not fully master whole-word processing.

The acquisition of reading skill was studied in 503 Italian children in first to eighth grade using a task that required reading of lists of words and non-words. Analysis of the metric characteristics of the measures indicated that reading speed but not accuracy was normally distributed across all ages considered. The role of specific effects (length, word frequency, and lexicality) versus global factors in reading speed was examined using the Rate-Amount Model (RAM). A global processing factor accounted for a large portion of the variance. Specific influences of length, frequency, and lexicality were detected in different periods of development over and above the global processing factor. Length modulated performance at early stages of learning and progressively less later on; in the case of non-words, the effect of length was large but did not change as a function of grade. The "lexicality" effect, present at all ages for high frequency words and by third grade for low frequency words increased with reading practice indicating a progressive differentiation in the ability to read words and non-words. Finally, the effect of word frequency was highest in third grade and then decreased. These findings are discussed in terms of their relevance for reading acquisition in a language with transparent orthography and their implications for evaluating developmental reading deficits. Overall, it is proposed that RAM is a useful tool for disentangling the role of specific versus global factors in reading development.

According to a recent theory of dyslexia, the "perceptual anchor theory," children with dyslexia show deficits in classic auditory and phonological tasks not because they have auditory or phonological impairments but because they are unable to form a "perceptual anchor" in tasks that rely on a small set of repeated stimuli. The theory makes the strong prediction that rapid naming deficits should only be present in small sets of repeated items, not in large sets of unrepeated items. The present research tested this prediction by comparing rapid naming performance of a small set of repeated items with that of a large set of unrepeated items. The results were unequivocal. Deficits were found both for small and large sets of objects and numbers. The deficit was actually bigger for large sets than for small sets, which is the opposite of the prediction made by the anchor theory. In conclusion, the perceptual anchor theory does not provide a satisfactory account of some of the major hallmark effects of developmental dyslexia.

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers participated in the study. All four groups read faster and more accurately pseudowords composed of root and suffix than simple pseudowords (Experiment 1). Unlike skilled young and adult readers, both dyslexics and younger children benefited from morphological structure also in reading aloud words (Experiment 2). It is proposed that the morpheme is a unit of intermediate grain size that proves useful in processing all linguistic stimuli, including words, in individuals with limited reading ability (dyslexics and younger readers) who did not fully develop mastering of whole-word processing. For skilled readers, morphemic parsing is useful for reading those stimuli (i.e., pseudowords made up of morphemes), for which a whole-word lexical unit does not exist; where such whole-word lexical units do exist, skilled readers do not need to rely on morphological parsing because they can rely on a lexical (whole-word) reading unit that is larger than the morpheme. (Contains 2 figures and 2 tables.)

Examines the characteristics of surface dyslexia in Italian, a language with high grapheme-phoneme correspondence. Reading performances of four boys are reported. (Author/VWL)

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