Ask a question! How Italian children with cochlear implants produce subject and object wh- questions

Syntax is impaired in individuals with cochlear implants (CIs). Several studies have shown that Italian speaking children fitted with CIs have troubles with relative clauses (Volpato & Adani 2009; Volpato 2010; Volpato 2012; Volpato & Vernice 2014), sentences containing clitic pronouns (Guasti et al. 2014), and wh-questions (Volpato & D’Ortenzio 2017). The aim of this study is to provide a detailed analysis of the production of wh-questions by a group of 13 Italian-speaking children fitted with CIs, and to compare their performance with a group of 13 typically developing children matched on comparable chronological age. Accuracy is lower in the group of children with CIs than in controls, but no significant difference was found between the two groups. However, much individual variability was observed. Some children with CIs showed good competence of Italian. Other children produce ungrammatical sentences, which is evidence of the linguistic delay associated to hearing impairment, even when they are fitted with CI

The production of relative clauses by Italian cochlear-implanted and hearing children

This study investigates the elicited production of subject (SRs) and object relatives (ORs) in Italian by 13 cochlear-implanted (CI) children (age:7;9-10;8) to determine whether and to what extent they differ from three groups of 13 normal hearing (NH) children matched on morphosyntactic abilities (age:5;0-7;9), chronological age (age:7;5-10;3), and auditory age (e.g. duration of CI use (age:4;11-9;4)) respectively. Results showed that for CI children, SRs are more accurate than ORs. The same asymmetry is observed in all NH groups, although NH children’s percentages of target responses are higher for both sentence typologies. The syntactic difficulty with ORs led CI and NH groups to adopt a considerable number of answering strategies: among them, production of passive relatives, causative constructions, and wh- elements replacing the complementizer che (‘that’). Individual performance variability within the CI group is observed. Some CI children showed good competence in Italian and age-peer performance by producing passive relatives, which are largely attested in older children’s production. For other CI children, however, the tendency to produce sentences attested in young children’s production is evidence of the linguistic delay associated to hearing impairment. In this case, the performance of these CI children was comparable to that of younger NH children

L’uso del test di ripetizione per la valutazione della competenza sintattica del bambino sordo con impianto cocleare

Reduced language inputs due to hearing loss can affect the development of syntactically complex structures derived by syntactic movement. Cochlear implants (CIs) can provide proper linguistic input to children with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. However, despite an early diagnosis and intervention, and the development of lexical skills and speech perception similar to typically developing age peers, children with CIs still show a delay in processing movement-derived structures. Following previous studies on deaf or hard-of-hearing Hebrew, and German-speaking children, this study provides first data on the repetition of movement-derived syntactically complex structures in Italian-speaking children with CIs. Indeed, as shown by previous studies, resorting to a sentence repetition task allow to analyse both the participant’s ability in analysing structures derived by movement and their memory skills. It also allows to exclude memory as the cause of misinterpretation of the stimuli. Results showed that children with CIs performed poorer than their typically developing age peers and showed many difficulties in all the structures characterized by a complex derivation. Interestingly, both groups showed several difficulties in the production of oblique prepositional and genitive relative clauses

Community-Level Responses to Iron Availability in Open Ocean Plankton Ecosystems

Predicting responses of plankton to variations in essential nutrients is hampered by limited in situ measurements, a poor understanding of community composition, and the lack of reference gene catalogs for key taxa. Iron is a key driver of plankton dynamics and, therefore, of global biogeochemical cycles and climate. To assess the impact of iron availability on plankton communities, we explored the comprehensive bio-oceanographic and bio-omics data sets from Tara Oceans in the context of the iron products from two state-of-the-art global scale biogeochemical models. We obtained novel information about adaptation and acclimation toward iron in a range of phytoplankton, including picocyanobacteria and diatoms, and identified whole subcommunities covarying with iron. Many of the observed global patterns were recapitulated in the Marquesas archipelago, where frequent plankton blooms are believed to be caused by natural iron fertilization, although they are not captured in large-scale biogeochemical models. This work provides a proof of concept that integrative analyses, spanning from genes to ecosystems and viruses to zooplankton, can disentangle the complexity of plankton communities and can lead to more accurate formulations of resource bioavailability in biogeochemical models, thus improving our understanding of plankton resilience in a changing environment

How do Italian-speaking children handle wh-questions? A comparison between children with hearing loss and children with normal hearing

In this paper, we analyse how Italian-speaking children with cochlear implants produce subject and object questions introduced by who and which+NP. The aim of the study is to analyse whether a correlation exists between the accuracy of the responses of an elicitation task of wh-questions and clinical variables (i.e. age of hearing aid fitting; age of cochlear implantation; duration of hearing experience) in a group of children with cochlear implants, in order to provide new evidences in support of the efficacy of early intervention in Italian-speaking children with hearing loss. The experimental group was composed of 10 children fitted with a cochlear implant, who were diagnosed and promptly fitted with hearing aids within the first year of life. All these participants received a cochlear implant when hearing aids did not provide enough auditory input anymore. Indeed, while the hearing aids only amplify sounds, cochlear implants directly stimulate the auditory nerve providing better auditory perception. Results were compared with those of two control groups. The first group was composed of 10 children with normal hearing and comparable chronological age, while the second group was composed of 10 children with normal hearing matched on comparable hearing experience. Children were assessed with a test for the elicitation of subject and object who and which+NP questions. Results show that the two control groups performed better than the experimental group. Moreover, some correlations were found between the accuracy of the production of complex structures and the age of fitting of the hearing aids and the hearing experience

Ask a question! How Italian children with cochlear implants produce subject and object wh- questions

Syntax is impaired in individuals with cochlear implants (CIs). Several studies have shown that Italian speaking children fitted with CIs have troubles with relative clauses (Volpato & Adani 2009; Volpato 2010; Volpato 2012; Volpato & Vernice 2014), sentences containing clitic pronouns (Guasti et al. 2014), and wh-questions (Volpato & D’Ortenzio 2017). The aim of this study is to provide a detailed analysis of the production of wh-questions by a group of 13 Italian-speaking children fitted with CIs, and to compare their performance with a group of 13 typically developing children matched on comparable chronological age. Accuracy is lower in the group of children with CIs than in controls, but no significant difference was found between the two groups. However, much individual variability was observed. Some children with CIs showed good competence of Italian. Other children produce ungrammatical sentences, which is evidence of the linguistic delay associated to hearing impairment, even when they are fitted with CI

The production of Wh- questions in a group of Italian cochlear-implanted children

The acquisition of complex syntactic structures is problematic for children with hearing impairment, even for those who use cochlear implants. This study investigates for the first time the production of wh- questions in a group of 8 cochlear-implanted children, in order to compare their performance with that of 8 normal hearing children. Accuracy is lower in the group of cochlear-implanted children than in controls. However, individual performance variability was observed. Some cochlear-implanted children show good competence in Italian and use response strategies found in older children; other children produce ungrammatical sentences and sentences attested in young children's productions, which is evidence of the linguistic delay associated to hearing impairment, even when they are fitted with cochlear implants

Il trattamento delle frasi relative in un bambino sordo portatore di impianto cocleare

Questo studio presenta un caso di trattamento delle frasi relative basato sull’insegnamento esplicito del movimento sintattico proposto ad un bambino di 8;5 anni affetto da ipoacusia neurosensoriale bilaterale con un impianto cocleare. Il trattamento descritto prende spunto da diversi studi sulla riabilitazione delle frasi derivate dal movimento sintattico condotte su pazienti afasici agrammatici e bambini con Disturbo Specifico del Linguaggio. I dati raccolti hanno mostrato, dopo la fine del trattamento, un miglioramento della performance del bambino nella produzione e nella comprensione delle frasi relative