Chiara Melloni
Biographic Data
| ID | 3077029 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chiara Melloni |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chiara |
| FAMILY NAME | Melloni |
| SIGNATURE | MELLONI C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Verona |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4711-2689 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Illusions of Plausibility: The Case of Semantic Attraction
Accommodation or Adaptation? How L2 Reading Proficiency Affects Reading Strategies in EFL Learners with and without Dyslexia
This study investigates how reading proficiency in an orthographically opaque foreign language (L2 English) modulates word recognition and decoding strategies of Italian adolescents with and without developmental dyslexia (DD), whose native language orthography is highly transparent. The size of the visual and phonological units that are processed while reading is modulated by the orthographic depth of the language being read. In the case of earl…
L2 learners take more time to catch the rhyme: An eye-tracking study on predictive processing
Aims and objectives: This study investigates the role of prediction in language comprehension for both native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers of English, focusing on phonological and semantic cues. In addition, it examines whether higher proficiency in the L2 enhances predictive abilities. Methodology: Using the Visual World Paradigm, we explore how Italian learners of English (L2) employ semantic and phonological cues during sentence parsing a…
Processing adjectives in development: Evidence from eye-tracking
Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic differences among (subsective) adjectives is underinvestigated. A visual-world experiment explores how It…
The Role of the Negated Information in Processing Negation: A Visual World Study
Evaluative Morphology and the Syntax of Adjectives in Italian
This paper addresses a well-known puzzle at the intersection of morphology and syntax: the categorical exclusion of adjectives modified by evaluative morphology from prenominal position in Italian. While Italian allows many adjectives to occur both pre- and postnominally, adjectives like piccolino, 'little-dim', are strictly postnominal (cane piccolino, lit. 'dog little-dim' vs. *piccolino cane, 'little-dim dog'), a distribution not fully explain…
The zero suffix in English and Italian deverbal nouns
In this paper we bring evidence from English and Italian deverbal zero nominals ( to climb > the climb - Ø N ) that zero is a possible spell-out of a nominalizer otherwise overtly instantiated in suffixed nominals ( examin- ation ). We argue in favor of a Distributed Morphology approach, a separationist theory that recognizes and easily implements zero morphology with underlying syntax-semantics. Abstracting away from other theoretical trends and…
Zero affixes in derivational morphology: Introduction
In this paper we offer an overview of the linguistic phenomena that have traditionally been handled by means of zero affixes and of the theoretical debate around the advantages and disadvantages of employing such null morphemes in theoretical modeling. While the advantage of positing zero affixes is straightforward from an empirical perspective (see inflectional syncretism and affixless category change, among others), their theoretical legitimacy…
The Acquisition of Negation in Italian
The acquisition of negation in Child Italian has not yet been comprehensively addressed in the literature. This paper aims to provide a fine-grained picture of the acquisition process in this Romance language by considering production data and exploring three specific aspects of negation development: (a) the emergence and subsequent development of negators and negative constructions, (b) the acquisition of negative functions and their varying pro…
Object relatives with postverbal subject in Italian-speaking children and adults: The role of encyclopedic knowledge in detecting sentence ambiguity
Italian relative clauses like Il bambino che bacia la mamma ‘the child that kisses the mom’ are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic (im)plausibility in processing these ambiguous constructions. Italian children’s (7;01–10;00 years old) and adults’ (21;08–…
Action nominalization: A view from Esahie (Kwa)
The paper provides a comprehensive account of the derivation of action nominals in Esahie, a Ghanaian language of the Tano subgroup (Kwa, Niger-Congo) which has been undocumented thus far, especially as far as morphosyntactic phenomena are concerned. The aim of the research is threefold: to contribute to language documentation, to provide a systematic description and analysis of the morphosyntactic properties of Esahie action nominals, and to off…
Inflectional morphology: Evidence for an advantage of bilingualism in dyslexia
It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualism interacts with dyslexia in a task measuring the subject’s morphological abilities, to verify if the advantage typically found in bilingualism arises also in presence of a linguistic pathology such as dyslexia. We administered a task assessing the abil…
Phonological Awareness across Child Populations: How Bilingualism and Dyslexia Interact
Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the development of an individual's language and literacy abilities. Phonological skills are indeed dramatically impaired in people with dyslexia, at any age and across languages, whereas their development in bilinguals is less clear. In addition, the interaction between bilingualism and dyslexia in this domain is still under-investigated. The aim of this p…
Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters
The aim of this work is to investigate how bilingual children perform with respect to monolingual children in a task eliciting direct object clitic pronouns in Italian. Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) (Bortolini et al. 2006). Moreover, this task is reported to be particularly challenging for early second language children (EL2), who are less …
Contrastive Studies in Verbal Valency
In recent years, issues of verbal valency, valency alternations and verb classes have seen a new upsurge of interest from a variety of perspectives. This book comprises articles investigating valency phenomena on a contrastive basis within Romance, Germanic and Slavic, and also in Basque and in the West-African language Ga, as well as classical Greek and Sanskrit. Phenomena include transitive and ditransitive constructions and alternations, invol…
Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children’s performance in a nonword pluralization task
Areal perspectives on total reduplication of verbs in Sinitic
The topic of reduplication in Sinitic languages has attracted much attention in the literature, but studies adopting a comparative and areal perspective are still lacking. This paper aims to analyse the correlations between form and function in reduplicating constructions in a sample of twenty Sinitic languages, representing eight branches of the family, comparing them to a set of fourteen non-Sinitic languages of the East- and Southeast Asian ar…
Parasynthetic compounds: Data and theory
This chapter is dedicated to parasynthetic compounding, a word-formation phenomenon consisting of the merger of two lexical stems (forming a non-existent compound) with a derivational suffix. On the basis of several classes of data pertaining to Slavic and Romance, we outline a formal analysis of the phenomenon in question and show that a constructionist account, recently developed within the Construction Morphology framework, cannot be applied t…
The Acquisition of Negation in Italian
The acquisition of negation in Child Italian has not yet been comprehensively addressed in the literature. This paper aims to provide a fine-grained picture of the acquisition process in this Romance language by considering production data and exploring three specific aspects of negation development: (a) the emergence and subsequent development of negators and negative constructions, (b) the acquisition of negative functions and their varying pro…
Phonological Awareness across Child Populations: How Bilingualism and Dyslexia Interact
Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the development of an individual's language and literacy abilities. Phonological skills are indeed dramatically impaired in people with dyslexia, at any age and across languages, whereas their development in bilinguals is less clear. In addition, the interaction between bilingualism and dyslexia in this domain is still under-investigated. The aim of this p…
Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters
The aim of this work is to investigate how bilingual children perform with respect to monolingual children in a task eliciting direct object clitic pronouns in Italian. Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) (Bortolini et al. 2006). Moreover, this task is reported to be particularly challenging for early second language children (EL2), who are less …
Parasynthetic compounds: Data and theory
This chapter is dedicated to parasynthetic compounding, a word-formation phenomenon consisting of the merger of two lexical stems (forming a non-existent compound) with a derivational suffix. On the basis of several classes of data pertaining to Slavic and Romance, we outline a formal analysis of the phenomenon in question and show that a constructionist account, recently developed within the Construction Morphology framework, cannot be applied t…
Areal perspectives on total reduplication of verbs in Sinitic
The topic of reduplication in Sinitic languages has attracted much attention in the literature, but studies adopting a comparative and areal perspective are still lacking. This paper aims to analyse the correlations between form and function in reduplicating constructions in a sample of twenty Sinitic languages, representing eight branches of the family, comparing them to a set of fourteen non-Sinitic languages of the East- and Southeast Asian ar…
Contrastive Studies in Verbal Valency
In recent years, issues of verbal valency, valency alternations and verb classes have seen a new upsurge of interest from a variety of perspectives. This book comprises articles investigating valency phenomena on a contrastive basis within Romance, Germanic and Slavic, and also in Basque and in the West-African language Ga, as well as classical Greek and Sanskrit. Phenomena include transitive and ditransitive constructions and alternations, invol…
Inflectional morphology and dyslexia: Italian children’s performance in a nonword pluralization task
Clitic Production in Bilingual Children: When Exposure Matters
The aim of this work is to investigate how bilingual children perform with respect to monolingual children in a task eliciting direct object clitic pronouns in Italian. Clitic production is considered a good clinical marker for Italian monolingual children suffering from specific language impairment (SLI) (Bortolini et al. 2006). Moreover, this task is reported to be particularly challenging for early second language children (EL2), who are less …
Object relatives with postverbal subject in Italian-speaking children and adults: The role of encyclopedic knowledge in detecting sentence ambiguity
Italian relative clauses like Il bambino che bacia la mamma ‘the child that kisses the mom’ are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic (im)plausibility in processing these ambiguous constructions. Italian children’s (7;01–10;00 years old) and adults’ (21;08–…
Action nominalization: A view from Esahie (Kwa)
The paper provides a comprehensive account of the derivation of action nominals in Esahie, a Ghanaian language of the Tano subgroup (Kwa, Niger-Congo) which has been undocumented thus far, especially as far as morphosyntactic phenomena are concerned. The aim of the research is threefold: to contribute to language documentation, to provide a systematic description and analysis of the morphosyntactic properties of Esahie action nominals, and to off…
Inflectional morphology: Evidence for an advantage of bilingualism in dyslexia
It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualism interacts with dyslexia in a task measuring the subject’s morphological abilities, to verify if the advantage typically found in bilingualism arises also in presence of a linguistic pathology such as dyslexia. We administered a task assessing the abil…
Phonological Awareness across Child Populations: How Bilingualism and Dyslexia Interact
Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the development of an individual's language and literacy abilities. Phonological skills are indeed dramatically impaired in people with dyslexia, at any age and across languages, whereas their development in bilinguals is less clear. In addition, the interaction between bilingualism and dyslexia in this domain is still under-investigated. The aim of this p…
The Acquisition of Negation in Italian
The acquisition of negation in Child Italian has not yet been comprehensively addressed in the literature. This paper aims to provide a fine-grained picture of the acquisition process in this Romance language by considering production data and exploring three specific aspects of negation development: (a) the emergence and subsequent development of negators and negative constructions, (b) the acquisition of negative functions and their varying pro…
The zero suffix in English and Italian deverbal nouns
In this paper we bring evidence from English and Italian deverbal zero nominals ( to climb > the climb - Ø N ) that zero is a possible spell-out of a nominalizer otherwise overtly instantiated in suffixed nominals ( examin- ation ). We argue in favor of a Distributed Morphology approach, a separationist theory that recognizes and easily implements zero morphology with underlying syntax-semantics. Abstracting away from other theoretical trends and…
Zero affixes in derivational morphology: Introduction
In this paper we offer an overview of the linguistic phenomena that have traditionally been handled by means of zero affixes and of the theoretical debate around the advantages and disadvantages of employing such null morphemes in theoretical modeling. While the advantage of positing zero affixes is straightforward from an empirical perspective (see inflectional syncretism and affixless category change, among others), their theoretical legitimacy…
L2 learners take more time to catch the rhyme: An eye-tracking study on predictive processing
Aims and objectives: This study investigates the role of prediction in language comprehension for both native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers of English, focusing on phonological and semantic cues. In addition, it examines whether higher proficiency in the L2 enhances predictive abilities. Methodology: Using the Visual World Paradigm, we explore how Italian learners of English (L2) employ semantic and phonological cues during sentence parsing a…
Processing adjectives in development: Evidence from eye-tracking
Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic differences among (subsective) adjectives is underinvestigated. A visual-world experiment explores how It…
The Role of the Negated Information in Processing Negation: A Visual World Study
Evaluative Morphology and the Syntax of Adjectives in Italian
This paper addresses a well-known puzzle at the intersection of morphology and syntax: the categorical exclusion of adjectives modified by evaluative morphology from prenominal position in Italian. While Italian allows many adjectives to occur both pre- and postnominally, adjectives like piccolino, 'little-dim', are strictly postnominal (cane piccolino, lit. 'dog little-dim' vs. *piccolino cane, 'little-dim dog'), a distribution not fully explain…
Illusions of Plausibility: The Case of Semantic Attraction
Accommodation or Adaptation? How L2 Reading Proficiency Affects Reading Strategies in EFL Learners with and without Dyslexia
This study investigates how reading proficiency in an orthographically opaque foreign language (L2 English) modulates word recognition and decoding strategies of Italian adolescents with and without developmental dyslexia (DD), whose native language orthography is highly transparent. The size of the visual and phonological units that are processed while reading is modulated by the orthographic depth of the language being read. In the case of earl…
Linguistics (13 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Reading and Literacy Development (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Language Development and Disorders (7 works) · Cognitive psychology (6 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (6 works) · Developmental psychology (4 works)