OBJECTIVES We investigated how fluctuations and linear changes in health and cognitive resources influence the motivation to engage in complex cognitive activity and the extent to which motivation mediated the relationship between changing resources and cognitively demanding activities. METHOD Longitudinal data from 332 adults aged 20-85 years were examined. Motivation was assessed using a co...

The purpose of this factorial study was to establish normative data for the Italian version of the Communication Attitude Test (CAT) in order to determine whether or not the speech-associated attitude reported by Italian children who stutter (CWS) differs significantly from that of their nonstuttering peers (CWNS). Toward this end, the Italian CAT was administered to 149 CWS and 148 CWNS betwee...

Linguistic drift is a process that produces slow irreversible changes in the grammar and function of a language’s constructions. Importantly, changes in a part of a language can have trickle down effects, triggering changes elsewhere in that language. Although such causally triggered chains of changes have long been hypothesized by historical linguists, no explicit demonstration of the actual c...

This study assessed whether the neonatal brain recruits different neural networks for native and non-native languages at birth. Twenty-seven one-day-old full-term infants underwent functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) recording during linguistic and non-linguistic stimulation. Fourteen newborns listened to linguistic stimuli (native and non-native language stories) and 13 newborns were...

In this paper, we are going to propose an approach to design linguistic models which are accurate to a high degree and may be suitably interpreted. This approach will be based on the development of a Hierarchical System of Linguistic Rules learning methodology. This methodology has been thought as a refinement of simple linguistic models which, preserving their descriptive power, introduces sma...