Comprehension and Production of Referential Expressions: An Instructional Intervention for Monolingual and Bilingual Italian Primary School Children

This study examined the effectiveness of an instructional intervention aimed to improve primary school children’s comprehension and production of anaphoric expressions in Italian. A total of 142 fourth- and fifth-grade students participated, including monolingual Italian children and bilingual children with Italian as a majority language and a migrant background. One half of the children (n = 82) received a 10-hour instructional intervention aimed at enhancing their understanding and use of anaphoric expressions. Pre- and post-assessments investigated anaphora resolution abilities and oral and written production of anaphoric expressions. Results revealed significant improvements in both comprehension and production for the experimental group, with monolingual children showing greater gains than bilinguals. Both monolingual and bilingual children, instead, exhibited significant improvements in referential production, particularly in appropriately using overt pronouns and in diversifying definite descriptions in texts. These findings suggest that targeted interventions can be effective in strengthening pronoun interpretation and use and in increasing lexical richness, although additional support may be needed for bilinguals to fully benefit from such training.