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Autism research that relies on preschool peers receives grant to study predictive factors for communication development
LAWRENCE — The National Institutes of Health recently awarded a $345,000 grant to University of Kansas researchers to further their work with up to 40 preschool children with autism spectrum disorder through a program called “Stay, Play, Talk.” Researchers are currently seeking study participants.
Professor invents new Italian word to translate poet Anne Carson’s work
LAWRENCE – Patrizio Ceccagnoli, University of Kansas associate professor, continues to make renowned poet and critic Anne Carson’s work available to Italian readers. Ceccagnoli has just published an Italian edition of Carson’s 2019 “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” released as “Era Una Nuvola” (“It Was a Cloud”). In Carson’s work, 20th century actress Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Baker) stands in for the Greek mythic symbol of beauty, Helen.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Jen Humphrey, Life Span Institute, 785-864-6621, [email protected], @kulifespan
Autism research that relies on preschool peers receives grant to study predictive factors for communication development
LAWRENCE — If you’ve ever witnessed the blur of activity that is a typical preschool-age child, it can be difficult to imagine them as disciplined research partners.
“That’s even a question we get from grant reviewers,” said Kathy Thiemann-Bourque, a scientist studying autism spectrum disorder at Juniper Gardens Children’s Project, a part of the University of Kansas Life Span Institute. “But if you ask the child if they remember what to do with their peers, they say, ‘I know! I know what I’m supposed to do: I’m going to stay, play and talk.”
One can imagine the indignation in a 5-year-old’s retort.
For more than 20 years, scientists at KU and elsewhere have studied such interventions that pair young children with peers of similar age who have autism spectrum disorder, and in particular, children with autism who have minimal verbal skills. These children are most at risk for long-term social, communication and academic challenges. The National Institutes of Health recently awarded a $345,000 grant to Thiemann-Bourque and to co-investigators Brian Boyd, director of Juniper Gardens Children’s Project, and Brenda Salley, assistant professor of pediatrics at the KU Medical Center, to further their research with up to 40 preschool children with autism spectrum disorder.
The research relies on an intervention method called “Stay, Play, Talk.” Typically developing preschoolers are trained on what characterizes each stage of activity, from staying with their buddy to taking turns with a toy to offering positive reinforcement. The activities are supported with an iPad programmed with concepts and object images to improve communication. Ultimately, the goal is to help minimally verbal children learn to communicate with the device, use more gestures and in some cases start talking more to their peers.
“It depends on the child, but we’ve had just incredible success with the children with autism becoming more responsive with their peers,” Thiemann-Bourque said. “We’ve seen some remarkable changes in many kids.”
But while some children in as little as two weeks have communicated more using the intervention, other children took four to six weeks or more. Identifying why some children with autism progress well with the peer and iPad-based intervention and some do not or don’t advance as quickly is the focus of the new grant.
For the project, researchers will recruit 40 preschool children in the Kansas City area with autism. The children will be evaluated before and after the intervention to determine what role social attention, such as paying attention to another child’s face, and interest in peers, such as imitating behavior of other children, helps predict their success following the Stay, Play, Talk intervention with the iPad.
Elisa Parker, assistive technology and autism consultant at the Gerner Family Early Education Center in the Park Hill School District, said that previous research at the school with Thiemann-Bourque had reinforced the need to provide opportunities for minimally verbal preschoolers to interact and communicate with their typically developed peers.
“We know that we want inclusion, and we want to make sure that we build a community of learners here, no matter their learning level at the time,” she said. “As a community, we know the importance of inclusion and supporting these young learners, but the earlier that we can make that happen, the more natural it’s going to be over time.”
Individuals interested in learning more about participating in the study can visit the KU Life Span Institute.
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Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Professor invents new Italian word to translate poet Anne Carson’s work
LAWRENCE – Patrizio Ceccagnoli is pleased to be on the short list of Italian translators of the renowned poet and critic Anne Carson. The University of Kansas associate professor of Italian has translated several of her works.
In September, Ceccagnoli’s first Italian edition of Carson’s 2019 “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” was released as “Era Una Nuvola” (“It Was a Cloud”) by the publisher Crocetti. It contains Ceccagnoli’s Italian translation side by side with Carson’s original English text of this “spoken and sung performance piece,” based on Euripides’ “Helen (of Troy).”
In Carson’s play/poem, 20th century film actress Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Baker) stands in for the Greek mythic symbol of beauty, Helen.
The book also contains a foreword by Ceccagnoli and an afterword featuring an interview he conducted with Carson.
Ceccagnoli said he became aware of the enigmatic, Canadian-born writer soon after moving from his Italian hometown of Perugia to New York in 2004 to pursue his doctorate at Columbia University.
“Anne Carson is a cult figure among readers of poetry, and in the last three decades she became a very prominent writer,” he said. “She is one of the most popular English-speaking poets alive, a recurrent candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.”
Ceccagnoli said he was drawn to Carson’s work in part because both of them are classicists – trained in the language and literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and because both of them “wanted to be Oscar Wilde.” Carson started her career as scholar of classics and translated several Greek classical plays into English, then branched out with works like “Antigonick” in 2012, a rewriting of Sophocles’ tragedy “Antigone” that takes artistic license with the original text – an approach not so different from her adaptation of “Helen” into “Norma Jeane.”
Ceccagnoli began translating Carson’s work into Italian starting in 2015 with some poems in the journal Poesia, published by Crocetti Editore in Milan.
Ceccagnoli’s first Carson book published in Italian was “Economy of the Unlost,” a book of (poetic) essays comparing one of the ancient Greeks to a modern poet. The translation “Economia dell’imperduto” came out in November 2020 from Milan-based Utopia Editore.
“‘Unlost’ is a neologism that Anne Carson coined,” Ceccagnoli said, “after translating the equivalent German word used by the Jewish poet Paul Celan, ‘unverloren.’ So I fought with the publisher to introduce a new word into our title and into the Italian language. At first, the publisher was skeptical about it. But then I got the support of some readers and also a major poet who wrote the introduction to the volume, Antonella Anedda. In the end, everybody was very happy with the result, as the book was quickly reprinted and sold more than 3,000 copies, which, for a scholarly work in translation, is quite a lot in Italy.”
The volume was nominated as the best 2020 nonfiction book in translation by the 600 jurors of the journal L’Indiscreto.
When Crocetti Editore asked Ceccagnoli to translate another Carson work, he chose “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” thinking that “this could be very captivating for the Italian audience, because Italians have a strong classicist background … because we are a Mediterranean country that produced Roman civilization and Latin literature, and the study of Greek language and literature are still quite popular.”
Ceccagnoli said he hoped that his version of “Norma Jeane” might be studied in Italian high schools someday.
He has one more Carson translation scheduled to come out in November from Utopia Editore. It is his Italian version of Carson’s influential 1986 nonfiction book, “Eros, the Bittersweet,” an essay on desire and language, mostly based on Sappho, Greek tragedy and Plato.
In addition, Ceccagnoli is currently working on an article for an Italian literary journal, scheduled to come out in 2022, on Carson’s debut poetic works, two narrative poems set in Italy. The first one, titled “Canicula di Anna,” is set in the Etruscan city Perugia, Ceccagnoli’s hometown.
“I’m working on Carson’s reception in Italy, which is growing now, but also about the presence of Italy in her work,” Ceccagnoli said. “There are some early works in her poetry collections that are set in Italy. … One called ‘The Fall of Rome’ speaks about a trip to Rome, Roman history, Italian language and art, and even Roman traffic. It includes Italian words in the text, along with Latin and French.”
Ceccagnoli said he is proud to be associated with a writer whom he genuinely admires, and he plans to continue working on her poetry in the next few years, along with his research focused on Italian modernism and avant-garde literature. Robert Frost famously defined poetry as “what gets lost in translation.” Thanks to Ceccagnoli’s work, Carson’s poetry remains “unlost” for the Italian readers. The Italian language grew a word: “imperduto.”
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