Ricerc@Sapienza

In this multiple case study we analyzed oral text comprehension, reading profiles and underlying cognitive abilities (attention, executive functions, working memory, narrative memory, rapid automatized naming and vocabulary) of 9 children identified as poor written text comprehenders after a school screening on 75 third grade children. Four out of the 9 children were named Language-Minority (L-M) children, since they had immigrant parents. The remaining 5 children were born in Italy from Italian parents.

During the past decades, converging evidence from clinical, neuroimaging and neuroanatomical studies has demonstrated the key role of the cerebellum in the processing of non-motor aspects of language. Although more is known about the way in which the cerebellum participates in the mechanisms involved in written language, there is ambiguous information on its role in other aspects of language, such as in non-motor aspects of spoken language.

We investigated whether the gender differences in working memory are linked to the nature of the stimuli (verbal vs. visuo-spatial) or to the type of processing (active vs. passive). With this aim, we administered two wellknown tests: Corsi Block-tapping test (CBT) and the Digit span (DS) using two versions: forward (fCBT and fDS) and backward (bCBT and bDS). During the forward processing (fCBT and fDS), subjects being required to repeat stimuli in the same order they are presented, passive working memory is assessed.

It is well-known that ageing is associated with a decrease in working memory abilities. It is not so clear at what age the decline begins and if there are differences in the decline of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory. This study investigates the effect of ageing on verbal and visuo-spatial working memory by comparing the performance of 880 subjects aged between 15- and 80-year old who were subdivided into five groups. The results show that age is negatively correlated with performance on both verbal and visuo-spatial working memory tasks.