Children with left perinatal arterial ischemic stroke (PAIS) often exhibit language deficits. However, evaluations of learning abilities are scarce. We compared word-referent associative learning and recall performance using a fast-mapping paradigm in a group of 3.5-year-old children with PAIS and in age-matched controls. The task involved a referent selection phase followed by immediate and delayed recall trials of the novel word-object associations. While no between-group differences were observed in the referent selection and immediate recall, children with PAIS showed lower performance in delayed recall of the newly learned associations. These results suggest that word learning difficulties after PAIS may arise due to a memory retention failure rather than to the process of referent selection through disambiguation involved in the fast mapping task. We discuss these findings in relation to the neural bases of infant language acquisition and their implications for clinical practice, particularly in terms of improving lexical acquisition and retention in children with PAIS.

One of the first papers to link metalinguistic awareness with third language learning was written by Jacqueline Thomas and published in the book "Cognitive processing by bilinguals". This article investigates how the phenomenon of metalinguistic awareness has been conceptualised over the last 30years of research and aims at demonstrating the relationship and significance of metalinguistic awareness to (early) multiple language learning. Word definition and its suitability for assessing both linguistic proficiency and metalinguistic awareness in multilingual children will be discussed as a fairly unknown approach in multilingualism research. The current study was carried out as part of a longitudinal large-scale study in the trilingual educational context of Ladin primary schools in South Tyrol, the northernmost province of Italy. According to the Ladin parithetical educational system pupils are taught in the three official languages German, Italian and the oldest language Ladin, a neo Latin, Rhaeto-Romance language. The results of the study indicate that not only did children aged eight and nine in the Ladin primary schools outperform the control group from a monolingually oriented German speaking school (with little exposure to Italian) in terms of formal and non-formal definitions but they also performed better with regard to their understanding of concrete and abstract terms, thereby falsifying Piaget's assumption that the correct use of abstract concepts would not be possible before middle-school age.

To examine whether processing of negated meanings is facilitated in highly predictable contexts and proceeds incrementally rather than with a delay, we asked participants to read highly constraining sentences containing negated adjectives (e.g., awake/responding/commercial) that were either strongly expected in a high-cloze condition (awake), weakly expected in a low-cloze condition (responding), or contextually inappropriate in a semantic violation condition (commercial). In accordance with findings for affirmative sentences, a smaller N400 was elicited for the high-cloze condition than for the low-cloze one, and for the low-cloze condition than the violation condition. The smaller N400 for the high-cloze condition suggests facilitated processing for strongly expected continuations. Furthermore, in the post-N400 time-windows, two distinct post-N400 positivities (PNPs) were elicited for the two weakly expected and unexpected continuations compared to strongly expected continuations. Firstly, a larger anterior PNP was observed for weakly expecting, but plausible, continuations in the low-cloze condition, suggesting inhibitory processes suppressing initial predictions to allow for the integration of the new information. Secondly, a larger posterior PNP was observed for unexpected and implausible, continuations in the violation condition, indexing contextual integration difficulties. Together, these findings suggest that negation can be processed incrementally in highly constraining contexts where predictions can be made, engaging similar neural mechanisms as predictive processing in affirmative sentences in such contexts. In sum, our results are consistent with previous ERP research on prediction processing in both affirmative and negated contexts but inconsistent with previous research using behavioral methods.