2,449 research outputs found
Communicative and linguistic development in preterm children: a longitudinal study from 12 to 24 months.
BACKGROUND: Research conducted on preterm children's linguistic skills has provided varying pictures, and the question of whether and to what extent preterm children are delayed in early language acquisition remains largely unresolved. AIMS: To examine communicative and linguistic development during the second year in a group of Italian children born prematurely using the 'Primo Vocabolario del Bambino' (PVB), the Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory. The primary goal was to compare action/gesture production, word comprehension, and word production, and the relationship between these three domains in preterm children and to normative data obtained from a large sample of Italian children born at term. A second aim was to address the longstanding debate regarding the use of chronological versus corrected gestational age in the assessment of preterm children's abilities. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Parents of twelve preterm children completed the PVB questionnaire at five age points during the children's second year, and scores were compared with those from a normative sample of full-term children and those of 59 full-term children selected as a control group from the normative sample for the PVB. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Preterm children exhibited a delay in all three aspects of communication and language. In particular, communicative-linguistic age tended to lag approximately 3 months behind chronological age when children were between the ages of 12 and 24 months. When chronological age was used, preterm children's percentile scores for all three components of communication and language fell within the lower limits of the normal range, while scores calculated using corrected age either fell at or above the 50th percentile. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Findings suggest that despite the significant biological risk engendered by premature birth, early communicative and linguistic development appears to proceed in a relatively robust fashion among preterm children, with tight relations across communicative domains as in full-term children. Employing both chronological and corrected gestational age criteria in the evaluation of preterm children's abilities may provide important information about their progress in language acquisition. This may be especially important during the initial stages of communicative and linguistic development, inasmuch as comparisons of the two sets of scores may provide clinicians with a way to distinguish children who may be at risk for language problems from those who may be expected to progress normally
On the evolution of the molecular line profiles induced by the propagation of C-shock waves
We present the first results of the expected variations of the molecular line
emission arising from material recently affected by C-shocks (shock
precursors). Our parametric model of the structure of C-shocks has been coupled
with a radiative transfer code to calculate the molecular excitation and line
profiles of shock tracers such as SiO, and of ion and neutral molecules such as
H13CO+ and HN13C, as the shock propagates through the unperturbed medium. Our
results show that the SiO emission arising from the early stage of the magnetic
precursor typically has very narrow line profiles slightly shifted in velocity
with respect to the ambient cloud. This narrow emission is generated in the
region where the bulk of the ion fluid has already slipped to larger velocities
in the precursor as observed toward the young L1448-mm outflow. This strongly
suggests that the detection of narrow SiO emission and of an ion enhancement in
young shocks, is produced by the magnetic precursor of C-shocks. In addition,
our model shows that the different velocity components observed toward this
outflow can be explained by the coexistence of different shocks at different
evolutionary stages, within the same beam of the single-dish observations.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
First ALMA maps of HCO, an important precursor of complex organic molecules, towards IRAS 16293-2422
The formyl radical HCO has been proposed as the basic precursor of many
complex organic molecules such as methanol (CHOH) or glycolaldehyde
(CHOHCHO). Using ALMA, we have mapped, for the first time at high angular
resolution (1, 140 au), HCO towards the Solar-type
protostellar binary IRAS 162932422, where numerous complex organic molecules
have been previously detected. We also detected several lines of the chemically
related species HCO, CHOH and CHOHCHO. The observations revealed
compact HCO emission arising from the two protostars. The line profiles also
show redshifted absorption produced by foreground material of the circumbinary
envelope that is infalling towards the protostars. Additionally, IRAM 30m
single-dish data revealed a more extended HCO component arising from the common
circumbinary envelope. The comparison between the observed molecular abundances
and our chemical model suggests that whereas the extended HCO from the envelope
can be formed via gas-phase reactions during the cold collapse of the natal
core, the HCO in the hot corinos surrounding the protostars is predominantly
formed by the hydrogenation of CO on the surface of dust grains and subsequent
thermal desorption during the protostellar phase. The derived abundance of HCO
in the dust grains is high enough to produce efficiently more complex species
such as HCO, CHOH, and CHOHCHO by surface chemistry. We found that
the main formation route of CHOHCHO is the reaction between HCO and
CHOH.Comment: Accepted in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society; 19
pages, 12 figures, 7 table
The chemical structure of the very young starless core L1521E
L1521E is a dense starless core in Taurus that was found to have relatively
low molecular depletion by earlier studies, thus suggesting a recent formation.
We aim to characterize the chemical structure of L1521E and compare it to the
more evolved L1544 pre-stellar core. We have obtained 2.52.5
arcminute maps toward L1521E using the IRAM-30m telescope in transitions of
various species. We derived abundances for the species and compared them to
those obtained toward L1544. We estimated CO depletion factors. Similarly to
L1544, -CH and CHOH peak at different positions. Most species
peak toward the -CH peak. The CO depletion factor derived toward the
dust peak is 4.31.6, which is about a factor of three lower
than that toward L1544. The abundances of sulfur-bearing molecules are higher
toward L1521E than toward L1544 by factors of 2-20. The abundance of
methanol is similar toward the two cores. The higher abundances of
sulfur-bearing species toward L1521E than toward L1544 suggest that significant
sulfur depletion takes place during the dynamical evolution of dense cores,
from the starless to pre-stellar stage. The CO depletion factor measured toward
L1521E suggests that CO is more depleted than previously found. Similar
CHOH abundances between L1521E and L1544 hint that methanol is forming at
specific physical conditions in Taurus, characterized by densities of a few
10 cm and (H)10 cm, when CO
starts to catastrophically freeze-out, while water can still be significantly
photodissociated, so that the surfaces of dust grains become rich in solid CO
and CHOH, as already found toward L1544. Methanol can thus provide
selective crucial information about the transition region between dense cores
and the surrounding parent cloud.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A, abstract abridge
Rotational spectroscopy of the HCCO and DCCO radicals in the millimeter and submillimeter range
The ketenyl radical, HCCO, has recently been detected in the ISM for the
first time. Further astronomical detections of HCCO will help us understand its
gas-grain chemistry, and subsequently revise the oxygen-bearing chemistry
towards dark clouds. Moreover, its deuterated counterpart, DCCO, has never been
observed in the ISM. HCCO and DCCO still lack a broad spectroscopic
investigation, although they exhibit a significant astrophysical relevance. In
this work we aim to measure the pure rotational spectra of the ground state of
HCCO and DCCO in the millimeter and submillimeter region, considerably
extending the frequency range covered by previous studies. The spectral
acquisition was performed using a frequency-modulation absorption spectrometer
between 170 and 650 GHz. The radicals were produced in a low-density plasma
generated from a select mixture of gaseous precursors. For each isotopologue we
were able to detect and assign more than 100 rotational lines. The new lines
have significantly enhanced the previous data set allowing the determination of
highly precise rotational and centrifugal distortion parameters. In our
analysis we have taken into account the interaction between the ground
electronic state and a low-lying excited state (Renner-Teller pair) which
enables the prediction and assignment of rotational transitions with up
to 4. The present set of spectroscopic parameters provides highly accurate,
millimeter and submillimeter rest-frequencies of HCCO and DCCO for future
astronomical observations. We also show that towards the pre-stellar core
L1544, ketenyl peaks in the region where - peaks,
suggesting that HCCO follows a predominant hydrocarbon chemistry, as already
proposed by recent gas-grain chemical models
A study of the -/- ratio in low-mass star forming regions
We use the deuteration of - to probe the physical
parameters of starless and protostellar cores, related to their evolutionary
states, and compare it to the -deuteration in order to
study possible differences between the deuteration of C- and N-bearing species.
We observed the main species -, the singly and doubly
deuterated species - and -, as
well as the isotopologue - toward 10 starless
cores and 5 protostars in the Taurus and Perseus Complexes. We examined the
correlation between the
(-)/(-) ratio and the dust
temperature along with the column density and the CO depletion
factor. The resulting
(-)/(-) ratio is within the
error bars consistent with in all starless cores with detected
-. This also accounts for the protostars except for the
source HH211, where we measure a high deuteration level of . The
deuteration of follows the same trend but is considerably
higher in the dynamically evolved core L1544. Toward the protostellar cores the
coolest objects show the largest deuterium fraction in
-. We show that the deuteration of
- can trace the early phases of star formation and is
comparable to that of . However, the largest
- deuteration level is found toward protostellar cores,
suggesting that while - is mainly frozen onto dust
grains in the central regions of starless cores, active deuteration is taking
place on ice
Deuteration as an evolutionary tracer in massive-star formation
Theory predicts, and observations confirm, that the column density ratio of a
molecule containing D to its counterpart containing H can be used as an
evolutionary tracer in the low-mass star formation process. Since it remains
unclear if the high-mass star formation process is a scaled-up version of the
low-mass one, we investigated whether the relation between deuteration and
evolution can be applied to the high-mass regime. With the IRAM-30m telescope,
we observed rotational transitions of N2D+ and N2H+ and derived the deuterated
fraction in 27 cores within massive star-forming regions understood to
represent different evolutionary stages of the massive-star formation process.
Results. Our results clearly indicate that the abundance of N2D+ is higher at
the pre-stellar/cluster stage, then drops during the formation of the
protostellar object(s) as in the low-mass regime, remaining relatively constant
during the ultra-compact HII region phase. The objects with the highest
fractional abundance of N2D+ are starless cores with properties very similar to
typical pre-stellar cores of lower mass. The abundance of N2D+ is lower in
objects with higher gas temperatures as in the low-mass case but does not seem
to depend on gas turbulence. Our results indicate that the N2D+-to-N2H+ column
density ratio can be used as an evolutionary indicator in both low- and
high-mass star formation, and that the physical conditions influencing the
abundance of deuterated species likely evolve similarly during the processes
that lead to the formation of both low- and high-mass stars.Comment: Accepted by A&AL, 4 pages, 2 figures, 2 appendices (one for Tables,
one for additional figures
A timeline for massive star-forming regions via combined observation of o-HD and ND
Context: In cold and dense gas prior to the formation of young stellar
objects, heavy molecular species (including CO) are accreted onto dust grains.
Under these conditions H and its deuterated isotopologues become more
abundant, enhancing the deuterium fraction of molecules such as NH that
are formed via ion-neutral reactions. Because this process is extremely
temperature sensitive, the abundance of these species is likely linked to the
evolutionary stage of the source.
Aims: We investigate how the abundances of o-HD and ND vary
with evolution in high-mass clumps.
Methods: We observed with APEX the ground-state transitions of o-HD
near 372 GHz, and ND(3-2) near 231 GHz for three massive clumps in
different evolutionary stages. The sources were selected within the
G351.77-0.51 complex to minimise the variation of initial chemical conditions,
and to remove distance effects. We modelled their dust continuum emission to
estimate their physical properties, and also modelled their spectra under the
assumption of local thermodynamic equilibrium to calculate beam-averaged
abundances.
Results: We find an anticorrelation between the abundance of o-HD and
that of ND, with the former decreasing and the latter increasing with
evolution. With the new observations we are also able to provide a qualitative
upper limit to the age of the youngest clump of about 10 yr, comparable to
its current free-fall time.
Conclusions: We can explain the evolution of the two tracers with simple
considerations on the chemical formation paths, depletion of heavy elements,
and evaporation from the grains. We therefore propose that the joint
observation and the relative abundance of o-HD and ND can act
as an efficient tracer of the evolutionary stages of the star-formation
process
Mapping deuterated methanol toward L1544: I. Deuterium fraction and comparison with modeling
The study of deuteration in pre-stellar cores is important to understand the
physical and chemical initial conditions in the process of star formation. In
particular, observations toward pre-stellar cores of methanol and deuterated
methanol, solely formed on the surface of dust grains, may provide useful
insights on surface processes at low temperatures. Here we analyze maps of CO,
methanol, formaldehyde and their deuterated isotopologues toward a well-known
pre-stellar core. This study allows us to test current gas-dust chemical
models. Single-dish observations of CHOH, CHDOH, HCO,
H_2\,^{13}CO, HDCO, DCO and CO toward the prototypical pre-stellar
core L1544 were performed at the IRAM 30 m telescope. We analyze their column
densities, distributions, and compare these observations with gas-grain
chemical models. The maximum deuterium fraction derived for methanol is
[CHDOH]/[CHOH] 0.080.02, while the measured deuterium
fractions of formaldehyde at the dust peak are [HDCO]/[HCO]
0.030.02, [DCO]/[HCO] 0.040.03 and [DCO]/[HDCO]
1.20.3. Observations differ significantly from the predictions of
models, finding discrepancies between a factor of 10 and a factor of 100 in
most cases. It is clear though that to efficiently produce methanol on the
surface of dust grains, quantum tunneling diffusion of H atoms must be switched
on. It also appears that the currently adopted reactive desorption efficiency
of methanol is overestimated and/or that abstraction reactions play an
important role. More laboratory work is needed to shed light on the chemistry
of methanol, an important precursor of complex organic molecules in space.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&
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