Verbal working memory resources may impact syntax comprehension. Thirteen Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs) were assessed in relative clause (RC) comprehension, digit span and nonword ...repetition and compared to 13 chronological age peers (CA) and 13 younger controls (LA) with normal hearing (NH). The RC comprehension task tested subject relatives (SR), object relatives with preverbal (OR) and postverbal subjects (ORp) where number features were manipulated. Children with CIs show worse performance than controls in RC comprehension and nonword repetition. In the RC task, number features facilitated comprehension by children with NH, but not by children with CIs. The memory measure that predicted RC comprehension was digit span. In the LA group, backward digit span predicted comprehension of all RC types. Forward digit span predicted comprehension of ORs with number mismatch in the CA group, and comprehension of ORs with number mismatch and ORps in children with CIs. In these conditions, high memory resources are needed to exploit number features in theta-role assignment.
Restrictive relative clauses are among the most frequently studied structures in language development across different languages and different populations. While much literature is devoted to the ...acquisition and use of subject and object relatives introduced by that, pied-piping (prepositional and genitive) relatives have been less studied. This paper offers an overview of some recent studies in which these structures were investigated in Italian typically developing (TD) individuals and in individuals with learning difficulties (LD) using the same procedures, namely repetition and/or elicited production. Early studies found that pied-piping relatives are acquired not earlier than 10 years of age. Much subsequent research on Italian found that the rate of production of these structures increases with age increase, but it never reaches ceiling effects. Although percentages increase for both populations, the level of accuracy for individuals with LD is lower than for TD individuals. This is expected, since pied-piping relatives are typical of a formal, written register, to which people with LD have difficult access. However, low frequency in speech cannot be the only explanation for the low rate of production. Syntactic complexity, agreement phenomena, and number of arguments that receive thematic role explains the difficulties with these structures.
Background
Weight gain after initiation of combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) is a possible side effect of all antiretroviral regimens, but it seems to be more evident in association with ...integrase strand transfer inhibitors (INSTIs). So, we aimed to evaluate weight change associated with an initial cART including one INSTI or darunavir–ritonavir (DRV/r).
Methods
A retrospective, observational, cohort study of antiretroviral therapy-naive adult HIV-positive patients starting an initial cART including raltegravir (RAL), dolutegravir (DTG), elvitegravir–cobicistat (EVG), or DRV/r. We compared changes in weight and body mass index (BMI) across the four groups during a 12-month follow-up.
Results
As a whole, 680 patients (470 males, mean age 42.1 years) were enrolled: 196 starting RAL, 174 DTG, 158 EVG/c, and 152 DRV/r. Baseline mean CD4 lymphocyte count was 455 cells/mm
3
and 7.3% had an AIDS diagnosis. After 12 months, mean increase in body weight was 1.93 kg in the RAL group, 2.38 kg in the DTG group, 2.14 kg in the EVG group, and 1.85 in the DRV/r group. Mean increase in BMI was 0.71, 0.84, 0.77 and 0.63 kg/m
2
, respectively (
p
> 0.05 for each comparison). Therefore, no significant increases in weight and BMI were reported in each group, and no significant differences in weight and BMI changes were described across the four treatment groups.
Conclusions
In our study, patients starting an initial cART including one INSTI or DRV/r after 12 months showed a small and comparable, but not significant, increase in body weight, whose long-term clinical consequences are unknown.
Reduced language inputs due to hearing loss can affect the development of syntactically complex structures derived by syntactic movement. Cochlear implants (CIs) can provide a 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 the processing of 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 causes in a 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 and genitive relative clauses.
Tenofovir disoproxil fumarate- (TDF-) related nephropathy is known to be a long-term complication of this drug, more commonly observed in HIV-infected patients, but occurring also in hepatitis B. ...Cases of Fanconi Syndrome associated with TDF have been reported in adult patients, usually as a long-term complication of chronic hepatitis B treatment. We present here a case of a 12-year-old male developing a severe acute HBV hepatitis treated with TDF. The patient achieved an early virological and biochemical response, but with a subsequent onset of proximal renal tubular damage, consistent with Fanconi Syndrome. After withdrawing this drug and switching to Entecavir, a complete resolution of tubulopathy and, after 6 months, a complete HBsAg seroconversion occurred. To our knowledge, this is the first report of an early renal injury due to TDF-therapy in a pediatric patient treated for acute hepatitis B.
This study investigates the production of clitic pronouns by monolingual Italian children aged 4;9-10;11, using a sentence repetition task including sentences with one or two restructuring verbs. The ...main findings are as follows: (i) children were more accurate with proclitics than enclitics, (ii) in their reproductions, they sometimes changed the clitic position and most often resorted to clitic climbing, to either the highest verb (in 2-verb sentences) or the intermediate verb (in 3-verb sentences), (iii) some instances of clitic reduplication were found, with similar tendencies as placement changes, (iv) no difference was observed between modal and motion verbs. These results show that restructuring is fully available to children and they prefer to produce monoclausal structures (Rizzi 1976, 1978/82; Cinque 2004) despite the long dependency established by clitic climbing. This in turn means that children’s grammar is guided by Structural Economy, like adults’ grammar. Children however assumed that restructuring verbs may be lexical less often than adults. Children never produced clitic misplacement errors, replicating previous findings on monolingual acquisition.
•Italian cochlear-implanted (CI) children were tested on a sentence production task.•CI children are less accurate than three groups of normal hearing children.•For CI children, subject relatives ...(SR) are more accurate than object relatives (OR).•When SRs and ORs are targeted, CI children used various answering strategies.•Individual performance variability within the CI group is observed.
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.
This study investigates the production of clitic pronouns by monolingual Italian children aged 4;9-10;11, using a sentence repetition task including sentences with one or two restructuring verbs. The ...main findings are as follows: (i) children were more accurate with proclitics than enclitics, (ii) in their reproductions, they sometimes changed the clitic position and most often resorted to clitic climbing, to either the highest verb (in 2-verb sentences) or the intermediate verb (in 3-verb sentences), (iii) some instances of clitic reduplication were found, with similar tendencies as placement changes, (iv) no difference was observed between modal and motion verbs. These results show that restructuring is fully available to children and they prefer to produce monoclausal structures (Rizzi 1976, 1978/82; Cinque 2004) despite the long dependency established by clitic climbing. This in turn means that children’s grammar is guided by Structural Economy, like adults’ grammar. Children however assumed that restructuring verbs may be lexical less often than adults. Children never produced clitic misplacement errors, replicating previous findings on monolingual acquisition.
This paper investigates the comprehension and the production of passive sentences in Italian-speaking children (aged 3 years, 4 months to 6 years, 2 months) analyzing both the variables observed in ...previous studies on other languages (verb type and presence of the by-phrase) versus an Italian-specific variable: the use of auxiliary venire “to come.” Because Italian venire is only possible in verbal passives, this property is crucial to determine whether children have full competence of the (verbal) passive structure. The high percentage of accuracy in the comprehension of sentences containing venire suggests that the eventive passive interpretation is fully available in child language, even in 3- to 4-year-old children. Moreover, young children produce passive sentences with either auxiliary venire or essere “to be,” also adding the by-phrase, thus proving unambiguously that children control verbal passive sentences from very early on.
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