Occupational therapy

Entry twelve is l’elaborazione sensoriale, and the noun inside it is the false friend an English reader will not notice tripping over. « Elaboration » in English means adding detail: a witness elaborates on a statement, and a design is « elaborate » because it carries more than it needs. Italian took the same Latin verb elaborare, to work something out, and kept the work rather than the ornament. Elaborare is to put material through a process and get a result: l’elaborazione dei dati is data processing, il tempo di elaborazione is the time a machine takes, and l’elaborazione del lutto is the slow working through of a bereavement. Nothing is being embellished in any of them. So l’elaborazione sensoriale is sensory processing, what the nervous system does with whatever arrives, and « sensory elaboration » would say that somebody is adding flourishes to a sensation. Read elaborazione as « processing » everywhere on this page, and keep « elaborate » for the Italian words that really mean it, dettagliato and ricercato.