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Dyslexia Research - John Nicholson - 01-08-2010
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[/SIZE][SIZE="6"]HERE WE HAVE A GROUP OF SIMILAR RESEARCH PROJECTS SAYING DIFFERENT THINGS
BUT ON CLOSE READING THEY MAY MAKE MORE SENSE
AND THE RESEARCH MAY MAKE MORE SENSE
BUT ON CLOSE READING THEY MAY MAKE MORE SENSE
AND THE RESEARCH MAY MAKE MORE SENSE
[SIZE="5"]Music Therapy Fails Dyslexics: No Link Between Dyslexia and a Lack of Musical Ability, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2010) — There is no link between a lack of musical ability and dyslexia. Moreover, attempts to treat dyslexia with music therapy are unwarranted, according to scientists in Belgium writing in the current issue of the International Journal of Arts and Technology.
Cognitive neuroscientist José Morais of the Free University of Brussels and colleagues point out that research into dyslexia has pointed to a problem with how the brain processes sounds and how dyslexic readers manipulate the sounds from which words are composed, the phonemes, consciously and intentionally. It was a relatively short step between the notion that dyslexia is an issue of phonological processing and how this might also be associated with poor musical skills -- amusia -- that has led to approaches to treating the condition using therapy to improve a dyslexic reader's musical skills.
Morais and colleagues demonstrate that theoretically this is an invalid argument and also present experimental evidence to show that there is no justification either for the link or for using music therapy to treat dyslexia.
Language and music are apparently uniquely human traits and many researchers have tried to find direct links between the two. A whole industry of music therapy hinges on this purported association with claims that language remediation is possible through the application of learning in music. Given the social importance of literacy, a role for music in helping poor or dyslexic readers to overcome their difficulties has been at the forefront of therapy for many years. Morais' team points out that the notion is based on studies that are generally flawed in two respects.
The first problem with studies that attempt to link a lack of musical ability with reading difficulties is that the quality of published empirical studies is quite variable and many reviews of the field fail to discard papers containing insufficient information, either on materials and methods, or on the experimental results. The second flaw is that many studies imply an explicit causality between amusia and dyslexia on the basis of results that are themselves merely statistical correlations. Such an approach to science leads to a circular argument in which some researchers argue that music discrimination predicts phonological skills, which in turn predicts reading ability and that reading ability implies phonological skills and so on.
More recent studies have broken the link between hearing and reading by showing that deaf children, who often learn to perceive speech accurately using lip reading and visual clues can have literacy levels just as high as hearing children. Of course, most of those children do not develop good musical ability with respect to musical pitch. Conversely, people who are unable even to hum a familiar tune show normal literacy levels.
Music and speech do overlap, but musical sounds and phonemes are not the same, the researchers explain. Musical tones are simply sounds, however, they are produced and can be heard without recourse to complex auditory analysis. Phonemes, in contrast, whether spoken or read, are abstractions of the units into which language might be broken down. They are purely symbolic and require significantly more interpretation to understand than simply hearing a sound.
"The conscious representations of phonemes play a crucial role in the learning of literacy abilities in the alphabetic writing system. Children do not become spontaneously aware of phonemes. Nor do they become aware of phonemes by learning music," the researchers say. The team has now studied the differing abilities of children, both with and without dyslexia, on understanding and interpretation of phonemes and syllables and musical notes and the intervals between them in a melody. They saw no significant differences between dyslexic readers and age-matched normal readers in the melodic tests.[/SIZE]
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Literacy is crucially dependent on phonological skills, but alphabetic literacy is strongly constrained by the development of phoneme awareness and abilities, and phonemes have no correspondence in music, the team explains. Thus, although music, through its emotional characteristics, might be a great motivational support for speech-based therapy, this limits, to a large extent, the possibilities of using music training to re-educate dyslexic readers.
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Dyslexia Research - John Nicholson - 01-08-2010
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Music Training Enhances Brainstem Sensitivity to Speech Sounds,
Neuroscientist Says
[/SIZE]Neuroscientist Says
[SIZE="5"]ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2010) — At a Feb. 20 press briefing held during the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, a Northwestern University neuroscientist argued that music training has profound effects that shape the sensory s
System and should be a mainstay of K-12 education.
"Playing an instrument may help youngsters better process speech in noisy classrooms and more accurately interpret the nuances of language that are conveyed by subtle changes in the human voice," says Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication Sciences at Northwestern University.
"Cash-strapped school districts are making a mistake when they cut music from the K-12 curriculum," says Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory in Northwestern's School of Communication.
Kraus presented her own research and the research of other neuroscientists suggesting music education can be an effective strategy in helping typically developing children as well as children with developmental dyslexia or autism more accurately encode speech.
"People's hearing systems are fine-tuned by the experiences they've had with sound throughout their lives," says Kraus. "Music training is not only beneficial for processing music stimuli. We've found that years of music training may also improve how sounds are processed for language and emotion."
Researchers in the Kraus lab provided the first concrete evidence that playing a musical instrument significantly enhances the brainstem's sensitivity to speech sounds. The findings are consistent with other studies they have conducted revealing that anomalies in brainstem sound encoding in some learning disabled children can be improved with auditory training.
The Kraus lab has a unique approach for demonstrating how the nervous system responds to the acoustic properties of speech and music sounds with sub-millisecond precision. The fidelity with which they can access the transformation of the sound waves into brain waves in individual people is a powerful new development.
"The neural enhancements seen in individuals with musical training is not just an amplifying or volume knob effect," says Kraus. "Individuals with music training show a selective fine-tuning of relevant aspects of auditory signals."
By comparing brain responses to predictable versus variable sound sequences, Kraus and her colleagues found that an effective or well-tuned sensory system takes advantage of stimulus regularities, such as the sound patterns that distinguish a teacher's voice from competing sounds in a noisy classroom.
They previously found that the ability of the nervous system to utilize acoustic patterns correlates with reading ability and the ability to hear speech in noise. Now they have discovered that the effectiveness of the nervous system to utilize sound patterns is linked to musical ability.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="6"][COLOR="DarkRed"]"Playing music engages the ability to extract relevant patterns, such as the sound of one's own instrument, harmonies and rhythms, from the 'soundscape,'" Kraus says. "Not surprisingly, musicians' nervous systems are more effective at utilizing the patterns in music and speech alike."
Studies in Kraus' laboratory indicate that music -- a high-order cognitive process -- affects automatic processing that occurs early in the processing stream. "The brainstem, an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain, is modified by our experience with sound," says Kraus. "Now we know that music can fundamentally shape our subcortical sensory circuitry in ways that may enhance everyday tasks, including reading and listening in noise."[/COLOR][/SIZE]
Dyslexia Research - John Nicholson - 01-08-2010
[SIZE="6"]How Music Training Primes Nervous System and Boosts Learning[/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]ScienceDaily (July 20, 2010) — Those ubiquitous wires connecting listeners to you-name-the-sounds from invisible MP3 players -- whether of Bach, Miles Davis or, more likely today, Lady Gaga -- only hint at music's effect on the soul throughout the ages.
Now a data-driven review by Northwestern University researchers that will be published July 20 in Nature Reviews Neuroscience pulls together converging research from the scientific literature linking musical training to learning that spills over to skills including language, speech, memory, attention and even vocal emotion. The science covered comes from labs all over the world, from scientists of varying scientific philosophies, using a wide range of research methods.
The explosion of research in recent years focusing on the effects of music training on the nervous system, including the studies in the review, have strong implications for education, said Nina Kraus, lead author of the Nature perspective, the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.
Scientists use the term neuroplasticity to describe the brain's ability to adapt and change as a result of training and experience over the course of a person's life. The studies covered in the Northwestern review offer a model of neuroplasticity, Kraus said. The research strongly suggests that the neural connections made during musical training also prime the brain for other aspects of human communication.
An active engagement with musical sounds not only enhances neuroplasticity, she said, but also enables the nervous system to provide the stable scaffolding of meaningful patterns so important to learning.
"The brain is unable to process all of the available sensory information from second to second, and thus must selectively enhance what is relevant," Kraus said. Playing an instrument primes the brain to choose what is relevant in a complex process that may involve reading or remembering a score, timing issues and coordination with other musicians.
"A musician's brain selectively enhances information-bearing elements in sound," Kraus said. "In a beautiful interrelationship between sensory and cognitive processes, the nervous system makes associations between complex sounds and what they mean." The efficient sound-to-meaning connections are important not only for music but for other aspects of communication, she said.
The Nature article reviews literature showing, for example, that musicians are more successful than non-musicians in learning to incorporate sound patterns for a new language into words. Children who are musically trained show stronger neural activation to pitch changes in speech and have a better vocabulary and reading ability than children who did not receive music training.
And musicians trained to hear sounds embedded in a rich network of melodies and harmonies are primed to understand speech in a noisy background. They exhibit both enhanced cognitive and sensory abilities that give them a distinct advantage for processing speech in challenging listening environments compared with non-musicians.
Children with learning disorders are particularly vulnerable to the deleterious effects of background noise, according to the article. "Music training seems to strengthen the same neural processes that often are deficient in individuals with developmental dyslexia or who have difficulty hearing speech in noise."
Currently what is known about the benefits of music training on sensory processing beyond that involved in musical performance is largely derived from studying those who are fortunate enough to afford such training, Kraus said.
The research review, the Northwestern researchers conclude, argues for serious investing of resources in music training in schools accompanied with rigorous examinations of the effects of such instruction on listening, learning, memory, attention and literacy skills.[/SIZE]
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"The effect of music training suggests that, akin to physical exercise and its impact on body fitness, music is a resource that tones the brain for auditory fitness and thus requires society to re-examine the role of music in shaping individual development, " the researchers conclude.
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Dyslexia Research - John Nicholson - 01-08-2010
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Sound Training Rewires Dyslexic Children's Brains For Reading
[/SIZE][SIZE="5"]ScienceDaily (Nov. 4, 2007) — Some children with dyslexia struggle to read because their brains aren't properly wired to process fast-changing sounds, according to a brain-imaging study published in the journal Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience.. The study found that sound training via computer exercises can literally rewire children's brains, correcting the sound processing problem and improving reading.
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According to the study's first author, Nadine Gaab, PhD, of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at Children's Hospital Boston, the finding may someday help clinicians diagnose dyslexia even before reading begins, and suggests new ways of treating dyslexia, such as musical training.
[/SIZE]Children with developmental dyslexia confuse letters and syllables when they read. The idea that they may have an underlying problem processing sound was introduced by Paula Tallal, PhD, of Rutgers University in the 1970s, but it has never been tested using brain imaging. Gaab used functional MRI imaging (fMRI) to examine how the brains of 9- to 12-year old children with developmental dyslexia, and normal readers, responded to sounds, both before and after using educational software called Fast ForWord Language, designed in part by Tallal, a co-author on the study.
Gaab first tested how the children's brains responded to two types of sounds: fast-changing and slow-changing. These sounds were not language, but resembled vocal patterns found in speech. As Gaab watched using brain fMRI, the children listened to the sounds through headphones. The fast-changing sounds changed in pitch or other acoustic qualities quickly--over tens of milliseconds--as in normal speech. By contrast, slow-changing sounds changed over only hundreds of milliseconds.
In typical readers, 11 brain areas became more active when the children listened to fast-changing, compared to slow-changing, sounds. Gaab set this as "normal." In dyslexic children, the fast-changing sounds didn't trigger this ramped-up brain activity. Instead, dyslexic children processed the fast-changing sounds as if they were slow-changing--using the same brain areas, at the same lower intensity. "This is obviously wrong," says Gaab.
Infants must correctly process fast-changing sounds, like those within the syllable "ba," in order to learn language and, later, to know what printed letters sound like. Infants use sound processing to grab from speech all the sounds of their native language, then stamp them into their brains, creating a sound map. If they can't analyze fast-changing sounds, their sound map may become confused.
[COLOR="Red"]"Children with developmental dyslexia may be living in a world with in-between sounds," says Gaab. "It could be that whenever I tell a dyslexic child 'ga,' they hear a mix of 'ga,' 'ka,' 'ba,' and 'wa'."
Reading trouble may develop when these children first see printed letters, Gaab and cognitive scientists believe, because at this stage, the children's brains wire their internal sound map to letters they see on the page. Linking normal letters to confused sounds may lead to syllable-confused reading.
But the brains of the children with dyslexia changed after completing exercises in a computer program known as Fast ForWord Language (Scientific Learning, Oakland, CA). The exercises involved no reading--only listening to sounds, starting with simple, changing noises, like chirps that swooped up in pitch. The children then had to respond--clicking to indicate, for instance, whether the chirp's pitch went up or down. The sounds played slowly at first--an easy task for the dyslexic children--but gradually sped up, becoming more challenging. The exercises then repeated with increasingly complex sounds: syllables, words, and finally, sentences.
The repetitive exercises appeared to rewire the dyslexic children's brains: after eight weeks of daily sessions--about 60 hours total--their brains responded more like typical readers' when processing fast-changing sounds, and their reading improved. It's unclear, though, whether the improvement lasts beyond a few weeks, since follow-up tests were not done. [/COLOR]Brain imaging study in preschoolers
Gaab has begun recruiting for a new study of preschoolers whose family members have dyslexia. By looking for sound-processing problems on brain fMRI, she hopes to catch dyslexia at an early stage, before the children begin learning to read--and then remediate it through sound training, sparing them from years of frustration and low self-esteem later in life.
She will also investigate what other types of sound training might help dyslexic children. Learning to sing or play an instrument, for example, involves gradual, repetitive, and intense listening and responding to fast-changing sounds.
"We've done a few studies showing that musicians are much better at processing rapidly changing sounds than people without musical training," says Gaab. "If musicians are so much better at these abilities, and you need these abilities to read, why not try musical training with dyslexic children and see if that improves their reading?"
Elise Temple, PhD, of Dartmouth College's Department of Education, was the senior author of the study, which was funded by the Haan Foundation and the M.I.T. Class of 1976 Funds for Dyslexia Research. Fast ForWord Language was developed by Tallal; Michael Merzenich, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco; William Jenkins, PhD, senior vice president at the Scientific Learning Corporation, and Steve Miller, PhD, of Rutgers University.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="7"]Neurological Differences Support Dyslexia Subtypes[/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]ScienceDaily (June 26, 2009) — Parts of the right hemisphere of the brains of people with dyslexia have been shown to differ from those of normal readers. Researchers have used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the two groups, and were able to associate the neurological differences found with different language difficulties within the dyslexic group.
Cyril Pernet, from the University of Edinburgh, worked with a team of researchers to compare the brains of 38 people with dyslexia to a model 'typical brain' created by combining the scans of 39 normal readers. In all cases, differences could be seen in either the right cerebellar declive or the right lentiform nucleus. These were associated with varying performance in language tests.
It is increasingly accepted that dyslexia is not a unique entity, but might reflect different neuro-cognitive pathologies. Researchers have been looking for a way to distinguish between different types of dyslexia for several years, and this research is among the first to show a direct link between brain structure and symptom severity. According to Pernet, "These results provide evidence for the existence of various subtypes of dyslexia characterized by different brain phenotypes. In addition, behavioral analyses suggest that these brain phenotypes relate to different deficits of automatization of language-based processes such as grapheme/phoneme correspondence and/or rapid access to lexicon entries".[/SIZE]
Dyslexia Research - John Nicholson - 01-08-2010
[SIZE="7"]Overcoming Dyslexia:
Timing Of 'Connections' In Brain Is Key[/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]ScienceDaily (Sep. 5, 2007) — Using new software developed to investigate how the brains of dyslexic children are organized, University of Washington researchers have found that key areas for language and working memory involved in reading are connected differently in dyslexics than in children who are good readers and spellers.
However, once the children with dyslexia received a three-week instructional program, their patterns of functional brain connectivity normalized and were similar to those of good readers when deciding if sounds went with groups of letters in words.
"Some brain regions are too strongly connected functionally in children with dyslexia when they are deciding which sounds go with which letters," said Todd Richards, a UW neuroimaging scientist and lead author of a study published in the current issue of the Journal of Neurolinguistics.
"We had hints in previous studies that the ability to decode novel words improves when a specific brain region in the right hemisphere decreases in activation. This study suggests that the deactivation may result in a disconnection in time from the comparable region in the left hemisphere, which in turn leads to improved reading. Reading requires sequential as well as simultaneous processes."
Richards and co-author Virginia Berninger, a neuropsychologist, said temporal connectivity, or the ability of different parts of the brain to "talk" with each other at the same time or in sequence, is a key in overcoming dyslexia. Berninger, who directs the UW's Learning Disabilities Center, compared dyslexia to an orchestra playing with an ineffective conductor who does not keep all the musicians playing in synchrony with each other.
"You have all of the correct instruments but, if the conductor is not doing his or her job of coordination, the right instruments are playing at the wrong time," she said. "This all goes away once the conductor finds a way to signal to the musicians to play at the proper times."
The UW researchers used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI, to explore brain connectivity. This type of imaging typically shows which parts of the brain are activated but does not indicate how they are connected. However, software developed by Richards, a professor of radiology, enabled the researchers to see brain activity in a specific region, the left inferior front gyrus. This region may serve as the "orchestra conductor" for language.
The software also provided a look at how this brain area was connected to a similar region in the right hemisphere. The software and the focus on language centers allowed the researchers to collect data that was not related to the children's heartbeat or breathing.
To explore brain connectivity, the researchers worked with 18 dyslexic children (5 girls and 13 boys) and 21 children (8 girls and 13 boys) who were good readers and spellers. All of the children were of normal intelligence and were in the fourth through sixth grades.
The children had to judge whether groups of pink highlighted letters in pairs of nonsense words could or could not represent the same sound. For example, the letters ea and ee in "pleak" and "leeze" could have the same sound but the ea and eu in "pheak" and "peuch" could not. The children's brains were scanned and then those with dyslexia participated in a three-week program that taught the children the code for connecting letters and sounds with an emphasis on timing. Then the children's brains were scanned again.
Following the treatment, the fMRI scans showed that the patterns of temporal connectivity in brains of the dyslexic children had normalized and were similar to those of the good readers and spellers. In particular, the researchers found that connectivity appeared to be normal between the left inferior frontal gyrus and the right inferior frontal gyrus. The left inferior frontal gyrus is believed to control the functional language system, especially for spoken words, while the right inferior frontal gyrus may be involved in controlling the processing of letters in written words. Prior to the treatment these two areas were overconnected and the left inferior frontal gyrus also was overconnected to the middle frontal gyrus, which is involved in working memory that requires temporal coordination.
"These results might mean that after special teaching the children with dyslexia activated letters in written words first and then switched to sounds in spoken words rather than simultaneously activating both letters and sounds," said Richards. "The overconnection between the language conductor and working memory at the same time may be a signal that working memory is overtaxed. When language processing is more efficient after treatment, working memory does not have to work as hard.
"There is this myth that English is an irregular language," added Berninger. "That's not true. We have a set of alternative ways of spelling the same sounds but this not taught explicitly. The way phonics is often taught over focuses on single letters and not the letter groups that go with sounds as well. Teaching children with dyslexia to read requires a different approach, one that stresses knowledge of spelling-sound relationships with a twist that tweaks the letter and sound processes to get connected in time in the brain."
The researchers caution that the intervention treatment is not a cure for dyslexia. They said it makes children better readers during specialized instruction, but has not been proven over a long period of time, something they hope to do in the future. "We have shown that gains can maintain for up to two years with behavior measures, but much research is needed before it can be demonstrated that functional brain connectivity can be maintained," said Berninger.
The research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.----
unny: [/SIZE]
Dyslexia Research - John Nicholson - 01-08-2010
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Brain Images Show Individual Dyslexic Children Respond To Spelling Treatment
ScienceDaily (Feb. 9, 2006) —
[/SIZE]ScienceDaily (Feb. 9, 2006) —
[SIZE="5"]Brain images of children with dyslexia taken before they received spelling instruction show that they have different patterns of neural activity than do good spellers when doing language tasks related to spelling. But after specialized treatment emphasizing the letters in words, they showed similar patterns of brain activity. These findings are important because they show the human brain can change and normalize in response to spelling instruction, even in dyslexia, the most common learning disability.
The research is unique in that it looks at images of individual brains rather than the composite group images, or maps, that are typically produced to show which areas of the brain are activated when people are engaged in specific tasks. Being able to study how individual brains differ between good and poor spellers and how they normalize after receiving one of two treatments is an important advance, according to University of Washington neuroimaging scientist Todd Richards and neuropsychologist Virginia Berninger, who headed the research team.
The new findings were published in the January issue of the journal Neurolinguistics.
"Most people think dyslexia is a reading disorder, but it is also a spelling and writing problem," said Berninger, who directs the UW's Learning Disabilities Center. "Our results show that all dyslexics in the 9- to 12-year-old range have spelling problems and children who cannot spell cannot express their ideas in writing."
Earlier research by the UW team and others has shown that dyslexic children exhibit a different pattern of brain activity while reading compared to youngsters who are good readers, but that the brain is malleable and this pattern can normalize with specialized instruction. However, even after receiving reading instruction, many dyslexic children still have persistent spelling problems, according to Berninger. Even so, she said, parents report that their children with dyslexia are typically dismissed from special education once they learn to read but before their spelling and writing problems are adequately treated.
Researchers have found that humans code words in three forms while learning how to read and spell. These codes draw on common and unique brain circuits. The brain codes words by their sound (or phonology), by the parts of words that signal meaning and grammar (morphology), and by their visual or written form (orthography).
In the new study, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to examine the brain activity of 18 dyslexic children (5 girls and 13 boys) who had problems with spelling and 21 children (8 girls and 13 boys) who were good readers and spellers. All of the children were of normal intelligence and were in the fourth through sixth grades.
Both groups of children had their brains scanned twice while doing a series of language tasks. The good spellers were scanned to provide a picture of normal brain activity while doing the tasks. The brains of the dyslexic children were imaged both before and after receiving 14 hours of one of two kinds of specialized spelling instruction over a three-week period. The dyslexic children were randomly assigned to either of two spelling treatments. One emphasized the letters in the written forms of words while the other focused on the parts of words that signal meaning and grammar.
Earlier research has shown that spelling development progresses through three stages -- phonological, orthographic and morphological. The treatment that was developmentally appropriate for children in grades four through six -- orthographic -- was the one associated with normalization of brain activation. After receiving the orthographic instruction that emphasized strategies for focusing on and remembering the letters in written words, the brain activity of the dyslexic children changed to more closely resemble that of the good spellers. The children's spelling on a standardized test also improved. Dyslexic children who received the other treatment, a morphological one that was more developmentally advanced, did not show normalized brain activation.
Prior to receiving either kind of instruction, the dyslexic children exhibited different patterns of brain activity than did the good spellers when performing each of the language tasks related to spelling. The dyslexics showed both absence of activity in a number of brain regions exhibited by the good spellers as well as activity in other brain areas that were not activated in the good spellers. [/SIZE]
Richards said that significant differences between the dyslexics and good spellers occurred in a small number of regions, suggesting that a few brain regions may have abnormal function during spelling development.
Berninger noted that three word codes involved in spelling during middle childhood -- phonology, morphology and orthography -- activate common and unique brain regions, but the specific activated brain regions associated with each word code may change during the course of a child's development in learning how to spell. For example, beginning readers create orthographic codes from the relationship of letters and phonology. Morphology plays a greater role in the longer, more complex words in middle school and high school curriculum.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[SIZE="6"]FOR MYSELF I READ AND READ LIKE LIGHTENING BUT SPELIN MY MEMORY WILL NOT RETAIN JUST LIKE LEFT AND RIGHT 4 ME[/SIZE]
[COLOR="DarkRed"]"Our research is telling us good spellers are taught, not born, as is often assumed," she said. "Unfortunately, what happens in most schools is dyslexic children learn how to read and then get dismissed from special education classes even though they still need specialized instruction until they learn to spell. Moreover, spelling is not systematically and explicitly taught in many classrooms in the United States.
###
The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development funded the research. Co-authors of the paper are Elizabeth Aylward, a UW neuroimaging scientist; William Nagy, a Seattle Pacific University educational linguist; and former UW graduate students Katherine Field, Amie Grimme and Anne Richards. [/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT]
Dyslexia Research - John Nicholson - 01-08-2010
[SIZE="7"]To Here But Not Sea: Complexities Of Spelling Difficulties Explored[/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]ScienceDaily (May 21, 2008) — Children who can read and have good phonetic skills - the ability to recognise the individual sounds within words – may still be poor spellers, a study of primary school children has shown.
In a paper to be published in Cortex , Eglinton and Annett show that this subgroup of poor spellers is more likely to be right handed than other poor spellers. The findings support the right shift theory of handedness and cerebral dominance, which predicts that dyslexics with good phonology would be strongly right-handed.
Poor spellers in normal schools, who were not poor readers, were studied for handedness, visuospatial and other cognitive abilities in order to explore contrasts between poor spellers with and without good phonology. It was predicted by the right shift (RS) theory of handedness and cerebral dominance that those with good phonology would have strong bias to dextrality and relative weakness of the right hemisphere, while those without good phonology would have reduced bias to dextrality and relative weakness of the left hemisphere.
Poor spellers with good phonetic equivalent spelling errors (GFEs) included fewer left-handers (2.4%) than poor spellers without GFEs (24.4%). Differences for hand skill were as predicted. Tests of visuospatial processing found no differences between the groups in levels of ability, but there was a marked difference in pattern of correlations between visuospatial test scores and homophonic word discrimination. Whereas good spellers (GS) and poor spellers without GFEs showed positive correlations between word discrimination and visuospatial ability, there were no significant correlations for poor spellers with GFEs.
The differences for handedness and possibly for the utilisation of visuospatial skills suggest that surface dyslexics differ from phonological dyslexics in cerebral specialisation and perhaps in the quality of inter-hemispheric relations. [/SIZE]
[SIZE="6"]New Brain Findings On Dyslexic Children: Good Readers Learn From Repeating Auditory Signals, Poor Readers Do Not[/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]ScienceDaily (Nov. 12, 2009) — The vast majority of school-aged children can focus on the voice of a teacher amid the cacophony of the typical classroom thanks to a brain that automatically focuses on relevant, predictable and repeating auditory information, according to new research from Northwestern University.
But for children with developmental dyslexia, the teacher's voice may get lost in the background noise of banging lockers, whispering children, playground screams and scraping chairs, the researchers say. Their study appears in the Nov. 12 issue of Neuron.
Recent scientific studies suggest that children with developmental dyslexia -- a neurological disorder affecting reading and spelling skills in 5 to 10 percent of school aged children -- have difficulties separating relevant auditory information from competing noise.
The research from Northwestern University's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory not only confirms those findings but presents biological evidence that children who report problems hearing speech in noise also suffer from a measurable neural impairment that adversely affects their ability to make use of regularities in the sound environment.
"The ability to sharpen or fine-tune repeating elements is crucial to hearing speech in noise because it allows for superior 'tagging' of voice pitch, an important cue in picking out a particular voice within background noise," said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.
In the article "Context-dependent encoding in the human auditory brainstem relates to hearing speech-in-noise: Implications for developmental dyslexia," Kraus and co-investigators Bharath Chandrasekaran, Jane Hornickel, Erika Skoe and Trent Nicol demonstrate that the remarkable ability of the brain to tune into relevant aspects in the soundscape is carried out by an adaptive auditory system that continuously changes its activity based on the demands of context.
Good and poor readers were asked to watch a video while the speech sound "da" was presented to them through an earphone in two different sessions during which the brain's response to these sounds was continuously measured.
In the first session, "da" was repeated over and over and over again (in what the researchers call a repetitive context). In the second, "da" was presented randomly amid other speech sounds (in what the researchers call a variable context). In an additional session, the researchers performed behavioral tests in which the children were asked to repeat sentences that were presented to them amid increasing degrees of noise.
"Even though the children's attention was focused on a movie, the auditory system of the good readers 'tuned in' to the repeatedly presented speech sound context and sharpened the sound's encoding. In contrast, poor readers did not show an improvement in encoding with repetition," said Chandrasekaran, lead author of the study. "We also found that children who had an adaptive auditory system performed better on the behavioral tests that required them to perceive speech in noisy backgrounds."
The study suggests that in addition to conventional reading and spelling based interventions, poor readers who have difficulties processing information in noisy backgrounds could benefit from the employment of relatively simple strategies, such as placing the child in front of the teacher or using wireless technologies to enhance the sound of a teacher's voice for an individual student.
Interestingly, the researchers found that dyslexic children showed enhanced brain activity in the variable condition. This may enable dyslexic children to represent their sensory environment in a broader and arguably more creative manner, although at the cost of the ability to exclude irrelevant signals (e.g. noise).
"The study brings us closer to understanding sensory processing in children who experience difficulty excluding irrelevant noise. It provides an objective index that can help in the assessment of children with reading problems," Kraus says.[/SIZE]
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For nearly two decades, Kraus has been trying to determine why some children with good hearing have difficulties learning to read and spell while others do not. Early in her work, because the deficits she was exploring related to the complex processes of reading and writing, Kraus studied how the cortex -- the part of the brain responsible for thinking --encoded sounds. She and her colleagues now understand that problems associated with the encoding of sound also can occur in lower perceptual structures.
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Dyslexia Research - John Nicholson - 01-08-2010
[SIZE="7"]How Noise And Nervous System Get In Way Of Reading Skills[/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]ScienceDaily (July 14, 2009) — A child's brain has to work overtime in a noisy classroom to do its typical but very important job of distinguishing sounds whose subtle differences are key to success with language and reading.
But that simply is too much to ask of the nervous system of a subset of poor readers whose hearing is fine, but whose brains have trouble differentiating the "ba," "da" and "ga" sounds in a noisy environment, according to a new Northwestern University study.
"The 'b,' 'd' and 'g' consonants have rapidly changing acoustic information that the nervous system has to resolve to eventually match up sounds with letters on the page," said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, where the work was performed.
In other words, the brain's unconscious faulty interpretation of sounds makes a big difference in how words ultimately will be read. "What your ear hears and what your brain interprets are not the same thing," Kraus stressed.
The Northwestern study is the first to demonstrate an unambiguous relationship between reading ability and neural encoding of speech sounds that previous work has shown present phonological challenges for poor readers.
The research offers an unparalleled look at how noise affects the nervous system's transcription of three little sounds that mean so much to literacy.
The online version of the study will be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on July 13.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="6"]The new Northwestern study as well as much of the research that comes out of the Kraus lab focuses on what is happening in the brainstem, an evolutionarily ancient part of the brain that scientists in the not too distant past believed simply relayed sensory information from the ear to the cortex.
As such, much of the earlier research relating brain transcription errors to poor reading has focused on the cortex -- associated with high-level functions and cognitive processing.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="6"]Focusing earlier in the sensory system, the study demonstrates that the technology developed during the last decade in the Kraus lab now offers a neural metric that is sensitive enough to pick up how the nervous system represents differences in acoustic sounds in individual subjects, rather than, as in cortical-response studies, in groups of people. Importantly, this metric reflects the negative influence of background noise on sound encoding in the brain.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="6"]"There are numerous reasons for reading problems or for difficulty hearing speech in noisy situations, and we now have a metric that is practically applicable for measuring sound transcription deficits in individual children," said Kraus, the senior author of the study. "Auditory training and reducing background noise in classrooms, our research suggests, may provide significant benefit to poor readers."[/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]For the study, electrodes were attached to the scalps of children with good and poor speech-in-noise perception skills. Sounds were delivered through earphones to measure the nervous system's ability to distinguish between "ba," "da" and "ga." In another part of the study, sentences were presented in increasingly noisy environments, and children were asked to repeat what they heard.
"In essence, the kids were called upon to do what they would do in a classroom, which is to try to understand what the kid next to them is saying while there is a cacophony of sounds, a rustling of papers, a scraping of chairs," Kraus said.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="4"]In a typical neural system there is a clear distinction in how "ba," "da" and "ga" are represented. The information is more accurately transcribed in good readers and children who are good at extracting speech presented in background noise.
"So if a poor reader is having difficulty making sound-to-meaning associations with the 'ba,' 'da' and 'ga' speech sounds, it will show up in the objective measure we used in our study," Kraus said.[/SIZE]
[COLOR="DarkRed"]Reflecting the interaction of cognitive and sensory processes, the brainstem response is not voluntary.
"The brainstem response is just what the brain does based on our auditory experience throughout our lives, but especially during development," Kraus said.[/COLOR]
[SIZE="5"]"The way the brain responds to sound will reflect what language you speak, whether you've had musical experience and how you have used sounds."[/SIZE]
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The Auditory Neuroscience Lab has been a frontrunner in research that has helped establish the relationship between sound encoding in the brainstem, and how this process is affected by an individual's experience throughout the lifespan. In related research with significant implications, recent studies from the Kraus lab show that the process of hearing speech in noise is enhanced in musicians.[/COLOR]
[SIZE="6"]"The very transcription processes that are deficient in poor readers are enhanced in people with musical experience," Kraus said. "It makes sense for training programs for poor readers to involve music as well as speech sounds."
The co-authors of the PNAS study are Jane Hornickel, Erika Skoe, Trent Nicol, Steven Zecker and Nina Kraus. Science News[/SIZE]
[SIZE="7"]Certain Skills Are Predictors Of Reading Ability In Young Children[/SIZE]
ScienceDaily (Nov. 20, 2008) — A new study in the journal Learning Disabilities Research & Practice reveals that differences found between pre-kindergarten reading-disabled children and their typically reading peers diminish in various measures by pre-first grade, with the exception of phonological awareness abilities.
[SIZE="5"]Susan Lambrecht Smith, Kathleen A. Scott, Jenny Roberts, and John L. Locke assessed children’s alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness (known as the conscious sensitivity to the sound structure of language), and rapid naming skills at the beginning of kindergarten and again prior to first grade as a function of later reading outcomes.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="6"]Results show that prior to kindergarten, children with reading disabilities were distinguished from their typically developing reading counterparts by their performance on tasks of letter knowledge, phonological awareness, and rapid naming skills. However, between these groups, only differences in skills related to phonological awareness persisted beyond the kindergarten year.[/SIZE]
[SIZE="5"]Measures of phonological awareness distinguished the reading disabled group from the control group at Pre-K and Pre-1. These results are consistent with observations that phonological awareness is a strong predictor of reading disability in both children at general risk and genetic risk of reading difficulty.
“Our findings have implications not only for initial assessment and identification, but also for how progress in early literacy skills is viewed,†the authors conclude. [/SIZE]
Dyslexia Research - John Nicholson - 03-08-2010
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MY SUMMARY OF BRAIN RESEARCH
AS I SEE IT AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS
OF PERSONAL RESEARCH
INTO BRAIN FUNCTION.
[/SIZE]AS I SEE IT AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS
OF PERSONAL RESEARCH
INTO BRAIN FUNCTION.
[SIZE="5"][COLOR="Red"]"Children with developmental dyslexia may be living in a world with in-between sounds," says Gaab. "It could be that whenever I tell a dyslexic child 'ga,' they hear a mix of 'ga,' 'ka,' 'ba,' and 'wa'."
Reading trouble may develop when these children first see printed letters, Gaab and cognitive scientists believe, because at this stage, the children's brains wire their internal sound map to letters they see on the page. Linking normal letters to confused sounds may lead to syllable-confused reading.
But the brains of the children with dyslexia changed after completing exercises in a computer program known as Fast ForWord Language (Scientific Learning, Oakland, CA). The exercises involved no reading--only listening to sounds, starting with simple, changing noises, like chirps that swooped up in pitch. The children then had to respond--clicking to indicate, for instance, whether the chirp's pitch went up or down. The sounds played slowly at first--an easy task for the dyslexic children--but gradually sped up, becoming more challenging. The exercises then repeated with increasingly complex sounds: syllables, words, and finally, sentences.
[SIZE="7"]The repetitive exercises appeared to rewire the dyslexic children's brains: after eight weeks of daily sessions--about 60 hours total--their brains responded more like typical readers' [/SIZE]when processing fast-changing sounds, and their reading improved. It's unclear, though, whether the improvement lasts beyond a few weeks, since follow-up tests were not done.[/COLOR][/SIZE]
Dyslexia Research - John Nicholson - 03-08-2010
[SIZE="7"][/SIZE]
MY SUMMARY OF BRAIN RESEARCH AS I SEE IT AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS OF PERSONAL RESEARCH INTO BRAIN FUNCTION.
The failure of any healthy child on earth that fails to learn to read well and not to develop first class mathematic ability is purely a failure of teaching procedure not a failure of individual teachers or of parents but a failure to recognise these facts and remedy them by the state.
The failure of any healthy child on earth that fails to learn to read well and not to develop first class mathematic ability is purely a failure of teaching procedure not a failure of individual teachers or of parents but a failure to recognise these facts and remedy them by the state.