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

Lingua orale e lingua dei segni: approcci possibili per lo sviluppo del linguaggio nei sordi

Deafness is a sensory impairment which strongly affects the normal acquisition and development of linguistic abilities. Deaf people are severely hindered in the development of oral speech because they do not have direct access to the linguistic input and many of them do not acquire much more than the rudiments of oral communication. While hearing children acquire easily and naturally a spoken language, deaf children might acquire in the same way a sign language, exploiting the visual modality. This study investigated the general linguistic competence in Italian of four different groups of deaf individuals (orally-trained children with cochlear implants, native signers, non-native signers and deaf foreigners adolescents and adults), by using a standardized picture matching task, in order to determine the level of their linguistic competence. Results revealed that most deaf individuals showed a performance comparable to that of very young hearing children. Cochlear implanted children performed significantly better than all the other groups, and the less accurate performance was that of foreigner deaf students, who often have not any kind of underlying language. Despite the better performance of cochlear implanted children, who generally do not use the sign language, the best solution to approach the oral language would appear to be the combination of oral training and sign language, in order to be able to communicate with both the deaf and the hearing communities. The school system in this sense should find some strategies in order to help deaf foreigners to get access to the grammar of the oral language.La sordità è una minorazione sensoriale che incide gravemente sulla normale acquisizione del linguaggio e sullo sviluppo delle abilità linguistiche. Le persone sorde, non avendo acesso diretto all’input linguistico, sono limitate nel loro sviluppo della lingua orale tanto che molti non acquisiscono che i rudimenti della comunicazione orale. Allo stesso modo dei bambini udenti, che acquisiscono spontaneamente e naturalmente la língua parlata, i bambini sordi possono acquisire la lingua dei segni, che si serve del canale visivo. Questo studio esamina la competenza linguística dell’italiano, in quattro differenti gruppi di individui sordi (bambini con impianto cocleare, segnanti nativi, segnanti non nativi e sordi stranieri adolescenti e adulti), studiata attraverso la somministrazione di uno specifico test standardizzato di misurazione della competenza linguistica, e che si avvale dell’associazione di immagini a frasi. I risultati provano che molti soggetti sordi mostrano una prestazione paragonabile a quella di bambini udenti molto più giovani. I bambini con impianto cocleare mostrano una prestazione considerevolmente migliore che negli altri gruppi, mentre la prestazione meno accurata è stata data dagli studenti sordi stranieri i quali spesso non possiedono nessuna lingua di base. Nonostante la prestazione migliore è risultata essere quella dei soggetti impiantati, che generalmente non usano la lingua dei segni, la migliore soluzione per un efficace approccio alla lingua orale, sembra essere la combinazione di apprendimento della lingua orale e uso della lingua dei segni, al fine di comunicare con la comunità sorda e la comunità udente. In tal senso il sistema scolastico dovrebbe trovare le strategie più adeguate per aiutare i sordi stranieri a sviluppare la grammatica della lingua orale del paese che li ospita

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

Blinatumomab in clinical management of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia: our experience.

La leucemia acuta linfoblastica a cellule B è una patologia rara nell'adulto (insorgenza pari a 1.1/100.000 abitanti) caratterizzata da una pessima prognosi. Risulta definita da tassi di sopravvivenza globale a 5 anni che nonostante gli sviluppi terapeutici negli ultimi due decenni non sono incrementati, con valori di sopravvivenza media del 49% nei pazienti standard-risk e del 24% nei pazienti high-risk. L'utilizzo di anticorpi ingegnerizzati bispecifici BiTE sembra dare risultati promettenti nei pazienti con neoplasie ematologiche. Nel nostro centro sono stati avviati tre protocolli di trattamento con anticorpo monoclonale bispecifico Blinatumomab comprendenti pazienti con LAL-B in remissione clinica e MDR (malattia minima residua) positiva, pazienti Philadelphia positivi pluri-trattati e ricaduti. In tutti e tre i gruppi i risultati sono stati soddisfacenti ed in linea coi risultati promettenti ottenuti negli studi precedenti avviati dalla casa farmaceutica Amgen. Tale molecola ha delle prospettive future indubbiamente incoraggianti.B-precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a rare disease in adult patients with a poor outcome. CR rates of 85%, but 5-year OS in standard-risk patient is 49% and 24% in high-risk patient. It's defined by a poor tolerance of prolonged chemotherapy, modest remissions in relapsed/refractory disease. Immunotherapy represents the most promising area of development of innovative therapeutic strategies for tumours, and the bispecific T-cell engager (BiTE) antibody Blinatumomab demonstrated both a good safety profile and a relevant antileukemic activity. We evaluated the efficacy and tolerability of blinatumomab in patients with relapsed or refractory Ph positive ALL, enrolled in three clinical trials in our center. These datas confirmed the promising results emerged from the experience in Ph negative setting

Introduction

This volume includes selected and adapted papers from The Romance Turn VII, held in Venice on October 1-3, 2015. As for previous edi-tions, the conference brought together researchers from across Europe and overseas with the aim of communicating results and developing further research in the acquisition of Romance languages. The selected papers focus on a broad range of topics which are at the heart of the current debate on language acquisition (clitic pro-nouns, left-dislocations, passives, relative clauses, wh-questions) in a number of different acquisition settings: L1 and L2 acquisition, bilin-gualism, typical and atypical development. In addition to syntax, the volume covers other modules of grammar: semantics, pragmatics, and phonology, and adds a perspective on language processing to the cur-rent discussion on the acquisition of Romance languages. It mainly focuses on Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Romanian, in a compara-tive perspective with other Romance languages (Catalan, European Portuguese, French, Spanish) and languages of other language families (English, German, Persian, Sesotho, Turkish, etc.). One contribution on bilinguals with Greek as one of the two languages opens a perspective on a Balkan non-Romance language which may be interesting to be compared with Romanian

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

Sarcopenia and malnutrition: impact on the outcome in hospitalized patients

Sarcopenia is a condition caused by a progressive loss of lean body mass and muscle strength, related to aging; this leads to a progressive decrease of physical performance. Sarcopenia is inherently connected with a major risk of disability, hospitalization and mortality. Prevalence of sarcopenia increases with increasing age, in particular among hospitalized geriatric patients, with male dominance. Malnutrition is also very frequent condition in elderly patients during hospital stay and it is involved in the development of sarcopenia. The most common therapeutic approach for both malnutrition and sarcopenia is an increased nutritional support with a protein-rich diet. This narrative review summarises the biological mechanism linking sarcopenia and malnutrition in older hospitalized patients and examines evidence supporting the use of oral nutritional support for the prevention and treatment of malnutrition an sarcopenia in acutely ill medical patients

Resumptive Relatives and Passive Relatives in Italian Cochlear-Implanted and Normal Hearing Children

This study investigates two answering strategies (namely object relatives with resumptive elements and passive relatives) provided by a group of hearing-impaired children using a cochlear implant (CI) and two normal hearing control groups in a production task aimed at eliciting object relatives. in the CI group, we have observed inter-subject variability in the production of ORs (with gap and resumptive elements) and PORs. Indeed, the children who used the former strategy, never (or rarely) used the latter, and vice-versa. In the control groups, ORs decrease with age, while PORs increase, replicating previous results. The higher percentage of PORs as opposed to ORs in some of the CI children is probably linked to the good cognitive and linguistic development attained, which is consistent with their chronological age. Their target use of PORs also shows that CI children have attained a good competence of the passive voice. The use of ORs with resumptive elements (especially resumptive DPs) by some of the CI children is instead a sign of the linguistic delay often associated to hearing impairment. We suggest that they make use of a large spectrum of UG possibilities for a longer period than normal-hearing age peers because it takes more time for them to set the parameters of the target language. They indeed behave like younger hearing children

Delirium in hip fractured patients

The current clinical case concerns the mixed delirium in a 70-year-old man with hip fracture, following a fall at home. In his medical history, the patient reported several comorbidities, among which also sarcopenia. Delirium was already diagnosed by the geriatrician on hospital admission. The patient underwent hip endoprosthesis surgery after 24 hours without any intra-operative complications. However, in the post-operative period delirium persisted, causing a prolonged hospital stay, a delayed physio-therapy rehabilitation with poor functional recovery, and subsequent insti-tutionalization. The prevalence of delirium in older people with hip fracture is extremely high and it is associated with several negative outcomes. Delirium is considered a multifactorial disorder, and, in particular, sarcopenia appears directly linked to the development of delirium. The systematic assessment of sarcopenia should be performed in hospitalized older patients with hip fracture, together with the other predisposing risk factors for delirium, to timely identify people at higher risk for both delirium and disability

Prevalence and impact of polypharmacy in older patients with type 2 diabetes

Background: Polypharmacy is a prevalent condition in older adults, especially those with multiple chronic diseases, and has been largely associated with adverse outcomes, including disability, hospitalizations, and death. Aims: This systematic review focused on diabetes and aimed to investigate the prevalence and impact of polypharmacy in older adults affected by such disease. Methods: Observational (either cross-sectional or longitudinal) or experimental studies investigating the frequency and impact of polypharmacy in older adults with diabetes were identified from scientific databases and grey literature until August 2021. The prevalence and the 95% Confidence Interval (95% CI) of polypharmacy in older people with diabetes were summarized by a random-effects meta-analysis. Results: From a total of 1465 records, 9 were selected for the qualitative synthesis, and 8 for the quantitative synthesis. Most studies defined polypharmacy using a cut-off for the minimum number of medications ranging from 4 to 6 drugs/day. The pooled prevalence of polypharmacy in older people with diabetes was 64% (95% CI 45–80%). Considering studies that used the same definition of polypharmacy (i.e. ≥ 5 drugs/day), the pooled prevalence was 50% (95% CI 37–63%). The between-studies heterogeneity was high. Across the selected studies, polypharmacy seemed to negatively influence both diabetes-specific (poor glycemic control and risk of hypoglycemia) and health-related (risk of incident falls, syncope, hospitalization, and death) outcomes. Conclusion: This systematic review confirms the high prevalence of polypharmacy in older people with diabetes and its strong impact on several health-related outcomes, including mortality. These results strengthen the need to improve care strategies for management of these patients