Table 1.
Demographic characteristics of the groups of participants involved in the study.
Fig 1.
Example of card used in the lexical learning task.
Fig 2.
Mean performance (and .05 confidence intervals) on the lexical learning task as a function of trial sequence.
Data (averaged between younger and older children) are presented separately for Italian and English participants.
Fig 3.
Mean performance (and .05 confidence intervals) of “younger” children on the lexical learning task as a function of trial sequence.
Data are separately presented for Italian and English participants. Interpolation is based on significant trends. For the Italian children, a linear regression well explains the data (y = 0.75 + 9.88x; r2 = .99). For the English children, performance is well explained by the combination of a linear and a quadratic trend (y = -14.59 + 24.02x -1.39x2; r2 = .99).
Fig 4.
Mean performance (and .05 confidence intervals) of “older” children on the lexical learning task as a function of trial sequence.
Data are separately presented for Italian and English participants. Interpolation is based on significant trends. For the Italian children, a linear regression well explains the data (y = 6.95 + 10.67x; r2 = .99). For English children, performance is well explained by the combination of a linear and a quadratic trend (y = -14.15 + 33.07x -2.82x2; r2 = .99).
Fig 5.
Mean performance (and .05 confidence intervals) of 5th grade Italian and English children on the lexical learning task as a function of trial sequence.
Interpolation is based on significant trends. For the Italian children, a linear regression well explains the data (y = 10.29x - 6.08; r2 = .99). For the English children, performance is well explained by the combination of a linear and a quadratic trend (y = -3.43x2 + 36.93x - 15.44; r2 = .99).
Table 2.
Trend analyses on data of the lexical learning task.
Younger cohort: Italian 2nd grader and English 3rd graders. Older cohort Italian 4th graders and English 5th graders.
Table 3.
Type of errors at the lexical learning task.
Table 4.
Means and standard deviations (SD) for the lexical learning task, as well as the raw scores for all other cognitive tasks.
For all measures in the table (except Digit span) higher scores correspond to worse performance (i.e., higher percentage of errors or longer RTs).
Table 5.
Pearson correlations between the Lexical learning task and other cognitive tasks.
Table 6.
Results of regression analysis with the lexical learning scores as dependent variable, and language and the scores in the other cognitive tasks as predictors.
Note that, in the case of Language and interactions with Language, the coefficient refers to Italian (taken as reference language). I. = Index.