Field Research in Rome within the Project Neurocognitive Abilities and Early Bilingual Development: Language Exposure and Executive Functions (NeuroLEEF), led by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nada Poropat Jeletić

Within the field research a set of standardized linguistic and cognitive instruments was administered in order to assess various aspects of children’s language development, narrative abilities, lexical competence, working memory and executive functions. The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was used to assess the comprehension and production of narrative structures, that is, to gain insight into the ways in which children organize, reproduce and interpret narrative material. The Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) enabled the assessment of sentence repetition abilities as indicators of language processing, syntactic competence and verbal memory. The Automated Working Memory Assessment (AWMA) was used to assess components of working memory, while the NEPSY-II – A Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment was included for the assessment of relevant neuropsychological and executive functions. Furthermore, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) was administered as an instrument for assessing receptive vocabulary.

The implementation of the research at the Rome research site represents an important step in the development of the NeuroLEEF project, whose aim is to deepen the understanding of the relationship between early monolingual and bilingual language development and executive functions. The specific scientific value of the research derives from its international dimension and from the use of instruments that make it possible to systematically relate linguistic, cognitive and neuropsychological indicators in early development. The testing was carried out by Dr. Renata Martinčić Marić from the Faculty of Educational Sciences of the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nada Poropat Jeletić from the Faculty of Humanities of the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula and Giorgia Mazzetti, a student from Università degli Studi Roma Tre, who had previously completed an Erasmus+ mobility period at the Department of Italian Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula. Her involvement in the fieldwork further confirms the international, collaborative and educational dimension of the project, particularly with regard to the inclusion of young researchers in empirical studies conducted in multilingual and interdisciplinary contexts. Participant recruitment was supported by professors Maria Chiara Di Muro (Istituto Comprensivo Bruno Munari, Cardinal Massaia/Walt Disney branch – primary school) and Mariaimmacolata Colarusso (Istituto Comprensivo Bruno Munari, Pietro Verri branch – lower secondary school).