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Biomedical subjects

G Bartolucci

Publications and source records attributed to G Bartolucci.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
PubMed1980

Cross-sectional studies of grammatical morphemes in autistic and mentally retarded children.

The frequency of occurrence of functors in obligatory contexts was studied in verbal autistic and mentally retarded children matched for nonverbal mental age, and the percentages of correct use of functors were rank-ordered. The grammatical complexity of their language was also described using a transformational grammar. The data were compared to those obtained in a normal group matched for mental age and to the data presented by Brown (1973) and deVilliers and deVilliers (1973) in younger children. The autistic subjects omitted functors frequently and independently of the grammatical complexity of their language. The rank ordering of morphemes was consistent within both the autistic and mentally retarded groups but showed no correlation between the two groups or to the rank ordering described by deVilliers and deVilliers. It is suggested that functors in autistic subjects may develop in an atypical but consistent order and that this may be due to specific semantic deficits, particularly in the areas of person and time deixis.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1979

Deployment, supervision and decision-making of residents in an emergency psychiatric service.

A lessening of personal discomfort felt by residents on-call in the Emergency Psychiatric Service has resulted from changes in the frequency of being on-call, exclusion of beginning residents from duty and arranging for the presence of a faculty psychiatrist for one or two hours during each on-call period. Coincidental significant reductions in the number of cases admitted to hospital and reductions in the proportion of discrepancies between diagnoses made by the emergency resident and those made later by inpatient unit staff have been described. The relationship of the changes in resident experience to the reduction in admissions and decreased proportion of diagnostic discrepancy has been discussed using a model of the process of emergency psychiatric admission described earlier by Bartolucci et al. (1). Less isolation, anxiety and some increased experience on the part of the psychiatric residents on duty in the Emergency Psychiatric Service results in greater awareness and better appraisal of the non-medical aspects of psychiatric emergencies.

Anxiety↗
PubMed1977

A syntactic investigation of verbal autistic, mentally retarded, and normal children.

The syndrome of childhood autism is typified by major abnormalities in language development, yet there are few systematic descriptions of autistic children's linguistic systems. We have, therefore, begun a comprehensive investigation of the language of verbal autistic children and concentrate in this paper on comparing the syntax used by 10 verbal autistic children matched for nonlinguistic mental age with a group of mentally retarded subjects and normal controls. Two different means of assessing syntactic development were utilized: Lee's Developmental Sentence analysis and Chomsky's Transformational analysis. The autistic group was found to rank significantly lower than either the mentally retarded or the normal groups in terms of Developmental Sentence Scores. When a transformational grammar was used to describe the language samples of our subjects the autistic children were typified by a higher error rate and lower level of complexity compared to the other two groups. However, the results also indicate that the grammatical system of autistic children is rule-governed and probably not unlike that of young normal or retarded children. In conclusion, it appears that the syntactic abnormalities characteristic of autism are attributable to an extreme delay in language development as well as to an impaired ability to make use of linguistic rules.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1976

Phonological investigation of verbal autistic and mentally retarded subjects.

A review of the pertinent literature indicates that autistic children are likely to show normal but delayed development of speech sounds. In contrast, atypical phonological development is suggested by experiments demonstrating that autistic subjects are deficient in their ability to extract the components of structured auditory input. A systematic investigation of the speech sound systems of verbal autistic and mentally retarded children reveals a delay in phoneme acquisition, as well as a relative uniformity of error types in both groups. The autistic subjects, however, differ significantly from the mentally retarded in the phonemic substitutions which they make. Autistic subjects are also characterized by a high correlation between frequency of phonological errors and level of overall language development. The findings are interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that the autistic group shows a more global delay in language development.

Adolescent↗