Since the late 19th century, millions of Italians have migrated to the New World, with Italian Americans now comprising approximately 11% of the US’s population. However, the Italian-American story has largely remained untold. Despite the fact that Italian Americans are increasingly prominent in many Želds, those outside the community of Italian Americans are not aware of its history (for a com...

Preaspiration is a comparatively rare phonetic feature, almost entirely confined to languages spoken in far northwestern Europe (Andersen 2002; Helgason 2002). A recent acoustic phonetic investigation into consonant gemination in Sienese Italian (e.g. Stevens & Hajek 2007), however, found that preaspiration occurred in one third of geminate /pp tt kk/ tokens. Up until that point preaspirated st...

This work reconstructs the atmosphere that developed in the city of Arezzo with the approval and application of Italian Law 180. A detailed description of the events, which saw this mediumsized community involved in what was to become an example for mental health policy, helps to illustrate the values underlying Italian Law 180. This endeavour was at once a scientific, cultural and political pr...

The paper addresses the challenge of converting MIDT, an existing dependency– based Italian treebank resulting from the harmonization and merging of smaller resources, into the Stanford Dependencies annotation formalism, with the final aim of constructing a standard–compliant resource for the Italian language. Achieved results include a methodology for converting treebank annotations belonging ...

The influence of standard Italian on the minor Romance languages spoken in Italy (i.e. the Italian dialects) permeates all aspects of their grammar. In this article, I provide an example of the way in which Italian prosody can affect dialects, a poorly studied type of influence. I show that a speaker may have a range of options available when speaking ‘dialect,’ including forms that are influen...

We describe an automatic projection algorithm for transferring frame-semantic information from English to Italian texts, as a first sep towards the creation of Italian FrameNet. Projection of frame semantic information from English to other European languages has already been investigated for German, Swedish and French. With our work, we point out typical features of the Italian language as reg...

In this study examination is given to the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) in a large community sample of adolescents. Additionally, a comparison was made between the anxiety scores of this Italian adolescent cohort (N=1975) and a comparative Dutch adolescent cohort (N=1115). Findings revealed that a five-factor ...

We examined the spelling acquisition in children up to late primary school of a consistent orthography (Italian) and an inconsistent orthography (English). The effects of frequency, lexicality, length, and regularity in modulating spelling performance of the two groups were examined. English and Italian children were matched for both chronological age and number of years of schooling. Two-hundr...

The underlying premise of this study was that the two phonetic subsystems of a bilingual interact. The study tested the hypothesis that the vowels a bilingual produces in a second language (L2) may differ from vowels produced by monolingual native speakers of the L2 as the result of either of two mechanisms: phonetic category assimilation or phonetic category dissimilation. Earlier work reveale...