Department of Education Sciences, University of Genoa, Corso Podestà 2, 16128 Genova, Italy.
Infant Behav Dev. 2012 Feb;35(1):71-82. doi: 10.1016/j.infbeh.2011.09.003. Epub 2011 Oct 19.
Individual differences in child temperament are associated with individual differences in language development. The present study examined the relationship between temperament and language ability in 109 twenty-four- to 30-month-old children. Parents and day-care teachers completed two questionnaires: the Primo Vocabolario del Bambino (Caselli & Casadio, 1995) and the Questionari Italiani del Temperamento (Axia, 2002). Researchers administered the First Language Test (Axia, 1993) to assess productive and receptive language in each child. Replicating previous research (Usai, Garello, & Viterbori, 2009), day-care teachers identified three temperamental profiles: most of the children fit into the first profile, typical of the Italian population; another profile was made up of easily distractible and not very persistent children, with a poor capacity to modulate motor activity; and the third profile of children were inhibited in new situations. A relationship was found between temperament assessed by day-care teachers and different levels of linguistic competence. In particular, the groups of "inattentive" and "inhibited" children showed poorer lexical and morphological abilities and a more immature vocabulary, characterised by the presence of more primitive components of the lexical repertory compared to the group of "typical" children. Unlike the results from day-care teachers, temperament questionnaires completed by parents revealed a 4-cluster-solution. Also, for parents, the "typical" profile is characterised by the largest vocabulary (productive and receptive) and the most mature semantic production.
儿童气质的个体差异与语言发展的个体差异有关。本研究调查了 109 名 24 至 30 个月大的儿童的气质与语言能力之间的关系。父母和日托教师完成了两份问卷：《Primo Vocabolario del Bambino》（Caselli & Casadio, 1995）和《Questionari Italiani del Temperamento》（Axia, 2002）。研究人员对每个孩子进行了《第一语言测试》（Axia, 1993），以评估他们的产出性和接受性语言能力。与之前的研究（Usai, Garello, & Viterbori, 2009）一样，日托教师确定了三种气质类型：大多数孩子属于第一个类型，这是意大利人口的典型特征；另一个类型由容易分心、不太坚持和运动活动调节能力差的孩子组成；第三个类型的孩子在新环境中表现出抑制。由日托教师评估的气质与不同的语言能力水平之间存在关系。特别是，“注意力不集中”和“抑制”的儿童组在词汇和形态方面表现较差，词汇量较不成熟，与“典型”儿童组相比，词汇库中存在更多原始成分。与日托教师的结果不同，父母填写的气质问卷显示出 4 聚类解决方案。此外，对于父母来说，“典型”特征表现为最大的词汇量（产出性和接受性）和最成熟的语义产出。
