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

An audiological perspective on ''Two further patients with Warsaw breakage syndrome. Is a mild phenotype possible?"

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Análisis de las dificultades conceptuales del movimiento circular a través de la resolución de problemas y la experimentación

En este trabajo se presenta un análisis de las estrategias y las dificultades que presentan estudiantes universitarios durante la resolución de tres problemas de movimiento circular. Los problemas fueron trabajados en dos comisiones con diferentes contextos, en una se trabajó con soporte experimental y en la otra no. Por otra parte, se describe cómo es abordado este tema en los libros que se recomiendan en la materia. A partir del análisis de los datos, por medio de una metodología exploratoria y cualitativa, se identificaron las dificultades de conceptualización que presentan los estudiantes al enfrentarse a la resolución de problemas sobre movimiento circular.In this paper, we present an analysis of the strategies and difficulties that University students have when solving three problems of circular motion. These problems were solved by two groups in different contexts. Only one of the groups worked using experimental support. Furthermore, we include a description on how this topic is treated by the books recommended for this subject. By analyzing the information using an exploratory and qualitative methodology, we identified the difficulties of conceptualization that students show when solving circular motion problems.Facultad de Ciencias Exacta

Syntactic intervention on relative clauses: two case studies on italian-speaking children with cochlear implants

This paper deals with the linguistic competence of two children with cochlear implants who showed weaknesses in the comprehension and production of relative clauses. These children were administered a protocol of language intervention based on formal linguistics and were explicitly taught verb argument structure, the Theta criterion, and syntactic movement used to derive relative clauses. Immediately after the intervention and some months later (2 and 5, respectively), the two children showed better comprehension and production of relative clauses. In addition, generalization effects were found. Non-treated structures and narrative skills (tested in one of the children) also improved, and improvement was maintained some months after the end of the treatment

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

A syntactically based treatment of relative clauses: Three case studies of Italian children with cochlear implant

In this paper, we describe three case studies of a syntactic intervention given to three Italian-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) to improve the production and comprehension of relative clauses, and also their narrative skills. The methodology adopted for the syntactic intervention follows previous studies on aphasic patients with agrammatism and children with developmental language disorders (DLD). Indeed, these studies have shown that an explicit teaching of syntactic rules helps in the recovery and improvement of complex structures derived by syntactic movement. Results showed a general improvement in the production and comprehension of relative clauses, and generalization effects to untrained structures. Moreover, also narrative skills improved. Results were maintained several months after the end of syntactic intervention