Dyslexia: Cognitive Endophenotypes paper

The study investigated cognitive deficits associated with dyslexia and familial risk of dyslexia (endophenotypes) by comparing children from families with and without a history of dyslexia.

Eighty-eight school-aged children were assessed on measures of phonology, language and rapid automatised naming.

A series of regression analyses with family risk and dyslexia status as predictors indicated that word recall, morphology, and rapid automatised naming were associated with the deficit, whereas the two phonological measures (phoneme awareness and nonword repetition) were associated with both literacy deficits and family risk, suggesting that the phonological deficit is an endophenotype of dyslexia.

Whereas the association with familial risk was similar for the two phonological measures, they differed in their relation to dyslexia status: Phoneme awareness showed a stronger association with dyslexia than risk status, whereas nonword repetition was more strongly related to the risk.

The data are interpreted within the framework of multiple deficit models of dyslexia.

Preview the original text at Taylor & Francis here

Dyslexia Linked to Brain’s Inconsistency with Encoding Sound

Researchers from Northwestern University report that they have found a biological mechanism that appears to play a vital role in learning to read.

This finding provides significant clues into the workings behind dyslexia — a collection of impairments unrelated to intelligence, hearing or vision that makes learning to read a struggle.

As many as one in 10 children is estimated to suffer from this disorder.

“We discovered a systematic relationship between reading ability and the consistency with which the brain encodes sounds,” said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication.

The report, titled “Unstable Representation of Sound: A Biological Marker of Dyslexia,” is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

For the study, researchers recorded the automatic brain wave responses of 100 school-aged children to speech sounds.

 They discovered that the very best readers encoded the sound most consistently while the poorest readers encoded it with the most difficulty.

The brain’s response to sound appears to stabilize as children learn to successfully connect sounds with their meanings.

On a positive note, biology is not destiny. In a previous study, the researchers found that the inconsistency with which the poorest readers encoded sound could be “fixed” through training.

In that study, children with reading difficulties were fitted for a year with assistive listening devices that transmitted their teacher’s voice directly into their ears.

After a year, the children made improvements in reading as well as in the consistency with which their brains encoded speech sounds, especially consonants.

“Use of the devices focused youngsters’ brains on the “meaningful” sounds coming from their teacher, diminishing other, extraneous distractions,” said Kraus.

“After a year of use, the students had honed their auditory systems and no longer required the assistive devices to keep their reading and encoding advantage.”

According to Kraus, people rarely have difficulty encoding vowel sounds, which are relatively simple and long.

It is consonant sounds, which are shorter and more acoustically complex, that are more likely to be incorrectly processed by the brain.

“Understanding the biological mechanisms of reading puts us in a better position to both understand how normal reading works and to ameliorate it where it goes awry,” says Kraus.

“Our results suggest that good readers profit from a stable neural representation of sound, and that children with inconsistent neural responses are likely at a disadvantage when learning to read,” Kraus adds.

“The good news is that response consistency can be improved with auditory training.”

Learning Difficulties: EEG shows insufficient processing of information

The reason why some people are worse at learning than others has been revealed by a research team from Berlin, Bochum, and Leipzig, operating within the framework of the Germany-wide network

"Bernstein Focus State Dependencies of Learning."

They have discovered that the main problem is not that learning processes are inefficient per se, but that the brain insufficiently processes the information to be learned.

The scientists trained the subjects' sense of touch to be more sensitive. In subjects who responded well to the training, the EEG revealed characteristic changes in brain activity, more specifically in the alpha waves.

These alpha waves show, among other things, how effectively the brain exploits the sensory information needed for learning.

Dr Hubert Dinse

"An exciting question now is to what extent the alpha activity can be deliberately influenced with biofeedback," says PD Dr. Hubert Dinse from the Neural Plasticity Lab of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

"This could have enormous implications for therapy after brain injury or, quite generally, for the understanding of learning processes."

The research team from the Ruhr-Universität, the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig) reported their findings in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Learning without attention: passive training of the sense of touch

How well we learn depends on genetic aspects, the individual brain anatomy, and, not least, on attention.

"In recent years we have established a procedure with which we trigger learning processes in people that do not require attention," says Hubert Dinse.

The researchers were, therefore, able to exclude attention as a factor. They repeatedly stimulated the participants' sense of touch for 30 minutes by electrically stimulating the skin of the hand.

Before and after this passive training, they tested the so-called "two-point discrimination threshold," a measure of the sensitivity of touch.

For this, they applied gentle pressure to the hand with two needles and determined the smallest distance between the needles at which the patient still perceived them as separate stimuli.

On average, the passive training improved the discrimination threshold by twelve percent -- but not in all of the 26 participants. Using EEG, the team studied why some people learned better than others.

Imaging the brain state using EEG: the alpha waves are decisive

Dr Petra Ritter

The cooperation partners from Berlin and Leipzig, PD Dr. Petra Ritter, Dr. Frank Freyer, and Dr. Robert Becker recorded the subjects' spontaneous EEG before and during passive training.

They then identified the components of the brain activity related to improvement in the discrimination test. The alpha activity was decisive, i.e., the brain activity was in the frequency range 8 to 12 hertz.

The higher the alpha activity before the passive training, the better the people learned.

In addition, the more the alpha activity decreased during passive training, the more easily they learned. These effects occurred in the somatosensory cortex, that is, where the sense of touch is located in the brain.

Researchers seek new methods for therapy

"How the alpha rhythm manages to affect learning is something we investigate with computer models," says PD Dr. Petra Ritter, Head of the Working Group "Brain Modes" at the MPI Leipzig and the Berlin Charité.

"Only when we understand the complex information processing in the brain, can we intervene specifically in the processes to help disorders," adds Petra Ritter.

New therapies are the aim of the cooperation network, which Ritter coordinates, the international "Virtual Brain" project, which her team collaborates on, and the "Neural Plasticity Lab," chaired by Hubert Dinse at the RUB.

Learning is dependent on access to sensory information

A high level of alpha activity counts as a marker of the readiness of the brain to exploit new incoming information.

Conversely, a strong decrease of alpha activity during sensory stimulation counts as an indicator that the brain processes stimuli particularly efficiently.

The results, therefore, suggest that perception-based learning is highly dependent on how accessible the sensory information is. The alpha activity, as a marker of constantly changing brain states, modulates this accessibility.

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum.http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/

Dyslexia: Cognitive subtypes of dyslexia

Recent research into Dyslexia and the large range or variations in perception and experience accorded to those who have this condition.

Different theories conceptualise dyslexia as either a phonological, attentional, auditory, magnocellular, or automatisation deficit.

Such heterogeneity suggests the existence of yet unrecognised subtypes of dyslexics suffering from distinguishable deficits.

The purpose of the study was to identify cognitive subtypes of dyslexia.

Out of 642 children screened for reading ability 49 dyslexics and 48 controls were tested for phonological awareness, auditory discrimination, motion detection, visual attention, and rhythm imitation.

A combined cluster and discriminant analysis approach revealed three clusters of dyslexics with different cognitive deficits.

Compared to reading-unimpaired children;

• cluster no. 1 had worse phonological awareness; 
• cluster no. 2 had higher attentional costs; 
• cluster no. 3 performed worse in the phonological, auditory, and magno-cellular tasks. 

These results indicate that dyslexia may result from distinct cognitive impairments.

As a consequence, prevention and remediation programmes should be specifically targeted for the individual child's deficit pattern.

You can access the research paper here at PubMed.gov

Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome - 'Meares–Irlen syndrome'

Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome also referred to as Irlen Syndrome after Helen Irlen, who in the early 1980's discovered that some people with poor reading showed a marked and immediate improvement by simply overlaying the pages with coloured plastic (e.g. acetate sheets).

Furthermore, in the early 1980s New Zealand teacher Olive Meares independently described the visual distortions some individuals reported when reading from white paper hence Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome may also be referred to as 'Meares–Irlen syndrome'.

Additionally the conditions is also refered to as 'Visual Stress' but the underlying condition is not caused by stress or anxiety.

It is believed that this condition affects, to varying degrees, approximately 12% of the population.

It is a neurological condition which causes the brain and/or eye to incorrectly process or interpret what the eye is seeing.

People with this condition will have increased difficulty reading and studying. Unfortunately standard sight tests and many educational assessments do not routinely detect this condition.

Fortunately, awareness of this condition is now much more widespread and it is recognised by many employers (esp. large companies), educational institutions and schools.


The main symptoms of Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome are:

• Light Sensitivity causes discomfort or difficulty under the following conditions:
• glare from lights (e.g. from on-coming headlights on cars)
• glare from surfaces (e.g. glaring spots of sunlight on cars)
• bright lighting
• fluorescent lights - including energy saving bulbs
• sunlight
• night vision

Contrast problems occur when difference between light and dark is very pronounced, for instance:
bold black text on bright white paper. The text or the background may appear to move, sometimes violently.

• vertical or horizontal window blinds where the contrast between the blinds and outside world can be significant. The blind may appear to move and/or the sufferer may not be able to see through the blinds clearly.
• stripy patterns and bold patterns such as those on some clothes, carpets, wallpaper, posters etc. can appear to move/vibrate and some patterns may appear to be three dimensional instead of flat.

These effects make reading such things as text, music, graphs, maps much more difficult and potentially tiring. Since wallpaper, carpets and clothes can also cause discomfort the world can feel a very harsh place.

Restricted field of clear vision
This causes only a few letters on a page appear clear and the rest of the page appears slightly out of focus (these focusing problems are not due to short/long sightedness or any physical problem with the eye)

For example when reading a sentence the sufferer can sometimes only clearly see a couple of letters at a time.

Depending on the severity of the condition this will severely limit the persons ability to speed read or skim through a page of text.

Being unable to physically clearly see whole words makes it harder to identify them quickly. Hence it is hard to instantly recognise words if only part of a word is seen clearly which makes learning to read extremely difficult.

Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome makes it more difficult to keep track of where you are on the page.

It is very easy to accidentally start reading the line below or above, or the words/letters in the wrong order. It is also hard to find the next line to be read. I often either skip or re-read a line.

Suppose if when teaching a child to read every time they are shown a given word they see a different part of the word because they can’t simultaneously see all the letters - so learning to read becomes nearly impossible.

Poor Depth Perception causes difficulty with judging the distance and the relationship between objects.

A lack of depth perception can cause problems with such things as difficulty with ball sports, escalators, walking and bumping into objects, driving/cycling and judging heights (I have no perception of height and have no fear when looking over bridges, cliffs etc.)


Attention and concentration difficulties as a result of these visual distortions.

Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome impairs the ability of the individual to read, study and work efficiently and it often causes our eyes to feel uncomfortable.

This lack of attention will probably display itself in one or more of the following ways:

• difficulty staying on a task such as reading or studying
• taking frequent breaks
• restlessness
• tiredness

Headaches and Migraines: a Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome sufferer is much more susceptible to headaches and migraines brought about by the visual distortions they are experiencing.

A woman's new thinking turns heads - Using the brain's Neuroplasticity

When Barbara Arrowsmith-Young realised her brain wasn't working, she changed it. Now others are following her.

IT'S the kind of memory that stays with you. When she was in first grade, Barbara Arrowsmith-Young's Canadian primary school teacher told her mother, in her presence, that she had some kind of "mental block", and would never be able to learn.

 Now that she has helped more than 4000 learning-disabled children overcome precisely that kind of diagnosis, of course, she can laugh at it. But she didn't at the time.

Arrowsmith-Young, now 61, talks fluently and passionately and with great erudition. She has a masters degree in school psychology. She has published a groundbreaking, widely praised and enthralling book called The Woman Who Changed Her Brain.

But back at school — indeed, up until she was in her mid-20s — she was desperate. Tormented and often depressed. She did not know what was wrong.

On the one hand, she was brilliant. She had near total auditory and visual memory. "I could listen to the 6 o'clock news, and reproduce it word-for-word at 11pm," she says. "I could open a book, read the first sentence, the second, the third, visualise them. I could memorise whole exercise books."

On the other hand, she was a dolt. "I didn't understand anything. Meaning just never crystallised. Everything was fragmented, disconnected."

She could recite film scripts, but not grasp the relationship between the hands of a clock to tell the time. So in exams, she often got 100 per cent.

Other times, whenever the task involved reasoning, logic, connection, interpretation, or when she simply pulled in the wrong information from her memory, she would get 10 per cent.

"The teachers did not understand," she says. "At school I used to get the strap, for not trying. They really thought I wasn't trying."

Her mother, a teacher, devised a series of flash cards with numbers and letters and, by dint of much hard work, she achieved literacy and numeracy, of a sort.

"For a long time, I reversed almost every letter and number," she says. "I was just not attaching meaning to symbols."

In secondary school, and later at university, she disguised her learning disabilities by working 20 hours a day: "I used to hide in the bathroom when the security guards came around the college library at night, then come back out and carry on."

The breakthrough came when she was 26. A fellow student gave her a book by a Russian neuro-psychologist, Aleksandr Luria: The Man with a Shattered World.

The book contained Luria's research and reflections on the writings of a highly intelligent Russian soldier, Lyova Zazetsky, who had been shot in the brain at the battle of Smolensk in 1943, and recorded in great detail his subsequent disabilities.

For the first time, Arrowsmith says, "I recognised somebody describing exactly what I experienced. His expressions were the same: living life in a fog.

His difficulties were the same: he couldn't tell the time from a clock, he couldn't understand bigger and smaller without drawing pictures, he couldn't tell the difference between the sentences 'the boy chases the dog' and 'the dog chases the boy'. I began to see that maybe an area of my brain wasn't working."

Reading Luria's research, Arrowsmith-Young learned that the bullet that struck Zazetsky had lodged in his left occipital-temporal-parietal region — the critical junction where, in principle, all incoming information from the lobes responsible for sight, sound, language and touch is synthesised, analysed and made sense of.

She realised that, in all probability, this was the region of her own brain that had been malfunctioning since birth.

Then she read about the work of Mark Rosenzweig, an American researcher who found that laboratory rats given a rich and stimulating environment, with play wheels and toys, developed larger brains than those kept in a bare cage.

Rosenzweig concluded that the brain continues developing, reshaping itself based on life experiences, rather than being fixed at birth: a concept known as neuroplasticity.

Arrowsmith-Young decided that if rats could grow bigger and better brains, so could she. So she started devising brain stimulation exercises for herself that would work the parts of her brain not functioning.

Read the full article here: A woman's new thinking turns heads

Brain Training is Life Changing! - YouTube

NB: We are not endorsing Learning Rx or any other products or services on this site and include this video and others for information only. This will allow our readers to stay informed about what is available in the Dyslexia and the Learning Disorders Environment and to be able to make informed decisions about their own specific needs. Enjoy!

Dyslexia: Increasing the Letter Spacing Can Help Readability

A French-Italian research team, jointly headed by Johannes Ziegler of the Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive (CNRS/Aix-Marseille Université) has determined that increasing the spacing between characters and words in a text improves the speed and quality of dyslexic children's reading according to a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

Stress may delay brain development in early years

Stress may affect brain development in children, altering growth of a specific piece of the brain and abilities associated with it, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"There has been a lot of work in animals linking both acute and chronic stress to changes in a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in complex cognitive abilities like holding on to important information for quick recall and use," says Jamie Hanson, a UW-Madison psychology graduate student.

"We have now found similar associations in humans, and found that more exposure to stress is related to more issues with certain kinds of cognitive processes."

Children who had experienced more intense and lasting stressful events in their lives posted lower scores on tests of what the researchers refer to as spatial working memory. They had more trouble navigating tests of short-term memory such as finding a token in a series of boxes, according to the study, which will be published in the June 6 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Brain scans revealed that the anterior cingulate, a portion of the prefrontal cortex believed to play key roles in spatial working memory, takes up less space in children with greater exposure to very stressful situations.

"These are subtle differences, but differences related to important cognitive abilities" Hanson says.

But they maybe not irreversible differences.

"We're not trying to argue that stress permanently scars your brain. We don't know if and how it is that stress affects the brain," Hanson says. "We only have a snapshot -- one MRI scan of each subject -- and at this point we don't understand whether this is just a delay in development or a lasting difference. It could be that, because the brains is very plastic, very able to change, that children who have experienced a great deal of stress catch up in these areas."

The researchers determined stress levels through interviews with children ages 9 to 14 and their parents. The research team, which included UW-Madison psychology professors Richard Davidson and Seth Pollak and their labs, collected expansive biographies of stressful events from slight to severe.

"Instead of focusing in on one specific type of stress, we tried to look at a range of stressors," Hanson says. "We wanted to know as much as we could, and then use all this information to later to get an idea of how challenging and chronic and intense each experience was for the child."

Interestingly, there was little correlation between cumulative life stress and age. That is, children who had several more years of life in which to experience stressful episodes were no more likely than their younger peers to have accumulated a length stress resume. Puberty, on the other hand, typically went hand-in-hand with heavier doses of stress.

The researchers, whose work was funded by the National Institutes of Health, also took note of changes in brain tissue known as white matter and gray matter. In the important brain areas that varied in volume with stress, the white and gray matter volumes were lower in tandem.

White matter, Hanson explained, is like the long-distance wiring of the brain. It connects separated parts of the brain so that they can share information. Gray matter "does the math," Hanson says. "It takes care of the processing, using the information that gets shared along the white matter connections."

Dyslexia is a cognitive reading disorder

Reading is an incredibly complex skill that is required to learn efficiently as a child develops.

Educators, Professional scientists, psychologists and many other researchers agree there exists a population who have cognitive difficulty in learning to read, even if no other impairments exist like: seemingly low intelligence, delayed development of the senses or emotional problems.

Dyslexia is a cognitive, language processing issue, which can be divided into two groups: dyseidesia and dysphonesia.

Dyseidetics have poor sight recognition of words. They have to sound out words and read very slowly because it is difficult for them to visualize words, spelling words that look different from what they sound like is a challenge.

Dysphonetics have difficulty sounding out words. They may read at a normal rate, but make many substitution errors.

People who suffer from Dyslexia often have a blend of these and other subtypes of dyslexia.

Unfortunately, optometrists will insist that Dyslexia can be 'cured' with some form of 'corrective' lens. If only the solution was that simple.

Many who have a reading disability, including those who have dyslexia, do develop inefficient eye movements and focusing problems. Therefore, lenses, eye glasses and vision therapy can be prescribed as part of a larger multidisciplinary effort to improve their ability to read and learn but it is not the complete answer.

Intellectual disability: New Form discovered

Researchers at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) led a study discovering a gene for a new form of intellectual disability, as well as how it likely affects cognitive development by disrupting neuron functioning.

CAMH Senior Scientist Dr. John Vincent and his team found a mutation in the gene NSUN2 among three sisters with intellectual disability, a finding to be published in the May issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

The discovery was made after mapping genes in a Pakistani family, in which three of seven siblings had intellectual disability as well as muscle weakness and walking difficulties, says Dr. Vincent, who heads the Molecular Neuropsychiatry and Development Laboratory in the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at CAMH.

Intellectual disability is a condition in which individuals have limitations in their mental abilities and in functioning in daily life. It affects one to three per cent of the population, and is often caused by genetic mutations.

Another study in the same journal, submitted together with the CAMH-led research, also identified NSUN2 gene mutations in Iranian and Kurdish families with intellectual disability.

As with the Pakistani family, first cousin marriages in these families carrying the mutations increased the likelihood of intellectual disability among their children, and enabled researchers to focus on areas to map genes.

“The combined results from these two studies mean that NSUN2 is among the most common causes of intellectual disability resulting from recessive genes,” says Dr. Vincent.

As a recessive disorder, a child must inherit one defective NSUN2 gene from each parent to develop intellectual disability. This gene, located on chromosome 5p, encodes a type of protein called an RNA methyltransferase.

At the cellular level, the researchers found that the mutated protein was prevented from reaching its target area within the nucleus of a cell. As a result, it was unable to perform its normal role in cell division and/or RNA methylation.

Collaborators from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Stem Cell Research in Cambridge, U.K., showed which type of brain cells were likely to be most affected by this mutation.

They are called Purkinje cells, a type of neuron that responds to the neurotransmitter GABA. Purkinje cells also control motor coordination, which were affected in the Pakistani family.

“We speculate that the muscle effects may result from the accumulation of the NSUN2 protein outside its target area in the nucleus,” says Dr. Vincent.

To date, Dr. Vincent’s lab has identified five genes causing different forms of recessive intellectual disability.

Low birthweight Infants at risk from Autism (5x)

Autism researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing have found a link between low birthweight and children diagnosed with autism, reporting premature infants are five times more likely to have autism than children born at normal weight.

The children, some born as small as about a pound, were followed for 21 years making this study, published in the prestigious journal Paediatrics, one of the most remarkable of its kind.

The infants were born between September 1984 through July 1987 in Middlesex, Monmouth, and Ocean counties in New Jersey at birthweights from 500 to 2000 grams or a maximum of about 4.4 pounds.

“As survival of the smallest and most immature babies improves, impaired survivors represent an increasing public health challenge,” wrote lead authorJennifer Pinto-Martin, MPH, PhD, director of the Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities Research and Epidemiology (CADDRE) at Penn Nursing.

“Emerging studies suggest that low birthweight may be a risk factor for autism spectrum disorders.”

Links between low birthweight and a range of motor and cognitive problems have been well established for some time, but this is the first study that establishes that these children are also at increased risk for autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

“Cognitive problems in these children may mask underlying autism,” said Dr. Pinto-Martin. “If there is suspicion of autism or a positive screening test for ASD, parents should seek an evaluation for an ASD.

Early intervention improves long-term outcome and can help these children both at school and at home.”

In future studies, Penn researchers will investigate possible links between brain hemorrhage, a complication of premature birth, and autism by examining brain ultrasounds taken of these children as newborns.

The researchers, including a team at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, followed 862 children from birth to young adulthood finding that five percent (5%) of the children were diagnosed with autism, compared to one percent (1%) of the general population in what researchers called “the first study to have estimated the prevalence of ASD . . . using research validated diagnostic instruments.”

The $3 million study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.(NIMH)

How Children Learn to Read - Book Review

This book brings together in one volume information about the neurobiological, genetic, and behavioral bases of reading and reading disabilities.

In recent years, research on assessment and treatment of reading disability (dyslexia) has become a magnet for the application of new techniques and technologies from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.

This interdisciplinary fusion has yielded numerous and diverse findings regarding the brain basis of this syndrome, which are discussed in this volume by leading researchers.

Intervention approaches based on such research are presented. The book also calls for research in specific directions, to encourage the field to continue moving into the bold frontier of how the brain reads.

The volume is essential reading for a range of researchers, clinicians, and other professionals interested in reading and reading disability, and also commemorates the tenth anniversary of the Extraordinary Brain Conferences hosted by The Dyslexia Foundation.

Table of Contents

W. Baker, Preface. P. McCardle, N. Landi, K. Pugh, Introduction.


Section 1. Major Themes in the Study of the Neurobiology of Dyslexia. S. Frost, R. Sandak, W.E. Mencl, N. Landi, J.G. Rueckl, L. Katz, K. Pugh, Mapping the Word Reading Circuitry in Skilled and Disabled Readers. G. Rosen, Y. Wang, C.G. Fiondella, J.J. Lo Turco, The Brain and Developmental Dyslexia: Genes, Anatomy, and Behavior. G. Sherman, C. Cowen, From Research Lab to School Front Lines: Talents and Dilemmas in Children with Learning Differences.


Section 2. Methods and Tools. D. Francis, Methodological Advances in Developmental Research. E. Mencl, S. Frost, K. Pugh, Tools for Multimodal Imaging. J. Rueckl, M. Seidenberg, Computational Modeling and the Neural Bases of Reading and Reading Disorders. E. Grigorenko, A.J. Naples, The Devil is in the Details: Decoding the Genetics of Reading.


Section 3. Neurobiological, Genetic, and Cognitive Aspects. F. Ramus, G. Szenkovits, Understanding the Nature of the Phonological Deficit. P. Cornelissen, Visual Word Recognition: Insights from MEG and Implications for Developmental Dyslexia. L.E. Cutting, S.H. Eason, K. Young, A.L. Alberstadt, Reading Comprehension: Cognition and Neuroimaging. R. Olson, B. Byrne, S. Samuelsson, Reconciling Strong Genetic and Strong Environmental Influences on Individual Differences and Deficits in Reading Ability. R. Frost, Reading in Hebrew vs. Reading in English: Is there a Qualitative Difference?


Section 4. Intervention. B. Foorman, S. Al Otaiba, Reading Remediation: State of the Art. L. Siegel, Remediation of Reading Difficulties in English Language Learning Students. M. Wolf, S. Gottwald, W. Galante, E. Norton, L. Miller, How the Origins of Reading Instruct our Knowledge of Reading Development and its Intervention. P. McCardle, K. Pugh, Integration of Methodologies in Cognitive Neuroscience: Research Planning and Policy.

Reviews

"This volume is a valuable contribution to our growing understanding of the biological and cognitive bases of dyslexia. We believe that researchers in neuroscience, genetics, and cognitive science will find useful summaries of current research in these areas. 

Reading instructors looking for current research that is relevant to the development of intervention programs will find the volume challenging but rewarding." – David W. Carroll and Debora P. Carroll in PsycCRITIQUES

Inclusivity Requires A Paradigm Shift

A billion is obviously an extremely large number of individuals, that have needs to be met.

In the Western world the populations are ageing, improvements in healthcare are helping people live longer – this means that the number of people who require assistance coping with age related conditions is only going to grow.

There are likely to be ever increasing numbers of people with poor vision, hearing loss, limited mobility and cognitive difficulties and we need to ensure that they are not excluded.

This is what is sometimes referred to as a Megatrend. Megatrends are great forces in societal development that will affect all areas – state, market and civil society – for many years to come.

Another Megatrend is the rapid growth and increased mobility of populations.

This will put a strain on all kinds of resources but from an inclusion point of view there is great deal of cross over with the needs of the disability community.

Economic migrants and refugees from war and famine will often face language barriers to inclusion in their new countries.

Couple this with the need to educate and raise literacy levels in the general population as a whole and you have a problem that is just too big for governments to ignore.

Read the remainder of this article here

Cognitive subtypes of dyslexia

Different theories conceptualise dyslexia as either a phonological, attentional, auditory, magnocellular, or automatisation deficit. Such heterogeneity suggests the existence of yet unrecognised subtypes of dyslexics suffering from distinguishable deficits.

The purpose of the study was to identify cognitive subtypes of dyslexia. Out of 642 children screened for reading ability 49 dyslexics and 48 controls were tested for phonological awareness, auditory discrimination, motion detection, visual attention, and rhythm imitation.

A combined cluster and discriminant analysis approach revealed three clusters of dyslexics with different cognitive deficits. Compared to reading-unimpaired children cluster no. 1 had worse phonological awareness; cluster no. 2 had higher attentional costs; cluster no. 3 performed worse in the phonological, auditory, and magnocellular tasks.

These results indicate that dyslexia may result from distinct cognitive impairments. As a consequence, prevention and remediation programmes should be specifically targeted for the individual child's deficit pattern.

Cognitive subtypes of dyslexia. [Acta Neurobiol Exp (Wars). 2008] - PubMed result

Web accessibility for cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties - Opera Developer Community

Introduction

Web accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties is one of the most overlooked subtopics of general web accessibility, despite it affecting the largest numbers. A large part of it is that there are so many conditions to understand in this area (far more than say visual or hearing impairments) and a lack of educational information available for learning about it.

In this article we will cover a few of the problems users with cognitive disabilities may have that can affect their ability to use the Web, as well as the things that developers can do to alleviate these problems and things they should avoid. A lot of what is covered will be well known and common sense to many, but is here for completeness.

What are cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties?

As with any aspect of accessibility, here we are less interested in specific conditions than we are with how they impact a person’s ability to use a website. These conditions affect a web user’s ability to perform one or more mental tasks. This includes problems with:

• reading text
• memory
• problem solving
• keeping focused (attention span)
• computation (for example calculations)
• non-verbal learning (for example difficulty with written materials)

For example, let’s have a look at some basic personas:

• Steve has problems processing text, particularly when words are spelt incorrectly or when sarcasm or metaphors are used (this is most likely dyslexia).
• Alison has short-term memory problems with what she sees and hears. It is difficult for her to remember what she has already entered in long forms or previously read in articles split into multiple pages.
• Jeremy has difficulty with problem solving. He struggles with unfamiliar circumstances, such as links to new places in a website or unclear form input error messages (this could be as a result of intellect, emotional or executive function impairments).
• Emily finds it difficult to focus on tasks, particularly when a web page has moving adverts or multiple pop-up windows.
• Thomas has problems with numbers; it can be difficult for him to estimate the total cost of items when buying online or to solve simple maths-based questions asked on some comment forms to prove he is not a spambot (this is most likely dyspraxia).
• Kate can have problems associating a representation of an object with the object itself, such as associating a picture of an apple with a real apple. She finds it easier to understand audio information than written or pictorial content.

Users can sometimes have a combination of cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties, and they may also have physical disabilities. It is important to be aware of the range of conditions that might affect your users, but at the same time you must avoid strict categorisation as every person is unique in their abilities — it is rarely simple, and there really is no one size fits all solution. For example, someone who is in the autistic spectrum may have none of the issues listed, but as this spectrum is concerned with making human connections and communication, certain visual or written nuances that would be obvious even to someone with a severe learning difficulty that affected the processing of information may be missed by someone in this spectrum. And someone with severe ADHD (inattention and hyperactivity) can find any task way more frustrating than what is considered as normal.

Areas to consider

You may find it difficult to create a web site that is accessible to all users with cognitive disabilities and learning difficulties because of the range of issues you need to consider.

You might find that a solution for one user is a hindrance to another, for example images could potentially be a distraction to someone who prefers text, even though combining content types is your best hope for universal accessibility. If you have a specific target group you can tailor content for that group, otherwise you have to tailor content for different information representations for different groups.

By following some simple guidelines you will be able to make your content available to as wide an audience as possible. A lot of this is fairly general web design best practices, but that’s what enables a lot of accessibility! Framing them in the context of cognitive disability should give you a better understand of the area.

Consistency

The first thing you should think about when designing your content is consistency. Users should be able to learn what to expect from each new page of your site — the various features should be consistent with previous pages, in terms of style, location and function.

What, in particular, should we be aiming to make consistent? Lets go through them.

Navigation

After the content itself, the site navigation is possibly the most important thing to get right. Its position and functionality should not change across a site, and it should be easily identifiable as navigation, with intuitive menu options.

Fonts and font sizes

Do not use too many different fonts, and treat them as you would a colour palette. Stick to a small number, perhaps one font for headings and one font for body text. Introducing a lot of variation serves to introduce distractions and noise, and this is something we want to avoid at all costs.

Interactive elements: links and buttons

It is important that users of any kind can recognise a link on your site. Links on a site need to follow the same style, and need to behave as a user would expect. Positioning, relevance, purpose and destination are all very important here.

The same goes for buttons, and there is much to be said for leaving buttons and other form controls as they are styled by the browser as this is what many users expect forms on the Web to look like. This not only delivers consistency across your site, but across all sites. Controls that are already familiar to a user will likely be less confusing.

Structure

It is important that content is well organised and structured. HTML gives us a limited set of elements to organise our content. Although we may sometimes find this restrictive it can actually be a good thing because it helps us be consistent as well. This section discusses the different facets of structure.

Headings

Headings and subheadings should be clear, meaningful and properly nested — they are a guide to the content on a page. Ideally it should be possible to get a good idea of what the content is about just by reading the headings.

Lists

By their very nature lists require more concentration to scan through and comprehend. Each item in a list should be short and concise, and further visual grouping of a list (eg using a different background colour to the rest of the page) – if you have a complicated concept to explain start with a list and then expand on each item under its own heading.

White space

White space is important for structure; without it all elements will merge in to one block and become incomprehensible. Look for good separation between headings, paragraphs, block quotes, etc. Pay particular attention to the spacing between columns of content; wide gutters or clear delineation with vertical borders can help.

Clear differentiation between content types

Use colour, font weights and other styles to differentiate between types of content, for example a quoted phrase could be emphasised, form labels could be strong. This makes it easier for users to determine the type of content they are looking at a glance.

Focus

Most users of websites are task-driven – they have a task that they want to perform, and they want to do it without distraction, as quickly as possible. It can be easy to distract attention from your content, so there are certain things to avoid, which we shall talk about now.

Contrasting blocks of colour

It is natural that a users eye will be drawn to the more colourful areas of the page, so avoid overly bright or intricate side columns or other needless distractions. You want to encourage users to be focused on the most important page content or functionality.

Unexpected sound

Avoid sounds that are played without the user specifically interacting with the source – this again will cause confusion.

Animations and other moving content

Movement on a page can be very distracting, especially if it happens automatically, without the user having any warning that is going to happen. The only place there should be movement is on the element the user is interacting with at that moment, for example a highlight on a navigation menu option, or playing a video when the user chooses to.

Pop ups and new tabs

Pop up windows and automatically loading content in new tabs moves attention away from the whole page — more confusion. In addition, popups usually tend to be adverts, therefore users tend to dismiss them regardless of their content.

Readability

Good readability guidelines apply to all text on your page, whether in navigation, graphics or just plain content. The most important part of any page is the content, and the following guidelines will help you make your content as readable and intuitive as possible.

Adequate text size and line height

A font size of 10px or 11px is often considered an acceptable minimum, however I would recommend 12px or 13px depending on the font (I am talking computed sizes here — you would of course set text size using a relative unit such as ems or percentage in your CSS). Although browsers have controls to adjust font sizes or zoom the entire page, there are no guarantees that a user will know how to use them.

Line height should be approximately one and a half times the font size.

Limited line length

Long line lengths can be difficult to read in some circumstances. Contrary to popular belief not all users have problems with long lines, but users with reading problems often do. Stick to a maximum of 70–80 characters of text per line.

Colour contrast

As for other users, good contrast between foreground and background is important. In addition, using colour to differentiate between links and regular text can help.

Short paragraphs

Write short paragraphs, each one focused on a single point or idea.

Transformability

Transformability means that your content can be changed in ways to suit different users. We will look at various mechanisms you can employ to support transformability in this section.

Support text resizing

The most basic type of transformation is changing text size. Your design should be able to support a font size increase of at least 200%; 300% preferably.

This is less of an issue now that most browsers support full page zooming, but there are still users that would prefer to increase font size without changing the width of the page, the images, or the containing columns.

Support user styles

Make it easy for users to apply their own styles via user stylesheets. Write good clean CSS, using low specificity on selectors and avoiding the use of !important.

Ensure it works without images, scripting or styles

Test that the site works without images, scripting or styles at all. This is the ultimate fallback for all users in all situations, and it makes it easier for them to provide a usable baseline like this, rather than them having to write their own style sheet. It is also a good test of the structure of your content.

Provide an API or feed

Provide an API or a feed to allow others to re-format your content. Ultimately it may not be possible to cater for all users on one site, but if other developers are able to take your content and reformat it for different situations, you will reach an even wider and more diverse audience.

Twitter is a great example of what can be done with an API. Not only is content and the ability to tweet available from the website but there are many different client applications that can be tailored to different users needs. Accessible Twitter is an alternative to the Twitter website, designed and optimised to be easier to use by disabled users.

Another example is Easy YouTube, created by Christian Heilmann. It is an interface to YouTube specifically designed for users with learning difficulties. As Christian himself says in the documentation, without the availability of various APIs this would not have been possible.

Content

Now on to the content itself, the most important part of a site. If you have marked up and structured your content correctly then it should be convertible to other forms, but if the content itself is broken then you have gone wrong from the beginning.

Spelling and grammar

Most users can probably get some meaning from content that has grammatical errors or spelling mistakes, but they can render a word or sentence completely meaningless to users with reading difficulties.

For commercial sites I would strongly advise using the services of a proof reader or professional copy editor.

For sites without a commercial budget, spell and grammar checkers are built in to most applications used to write content, so use them, but make sure you also give your content a human proof read as best you can.

Definitions of terms

Define any abbreviations, acronyms or technical terms. Provide a glossary for complicated or technical subjects. Avoid jargon if you can, but not to the point of removing clarity from the content.

One subject

Stick to the subject of your page; be focused and avoid digression.

Summarise

Summarise the content of your page as an introductory paragraph. This allows your user to determine if this is the content they are looking for early on to avoid frustration.

Mix content types

Different users may find different forms of content easier to consume. For one user lots of images and less text may be more understandable, whereas for another the same content spoken in a video might be better.

Wherever resources allow, try to provide your content in multiple formats. Don’t forget to caption videos and transcribe audio content.

Obviously this can make content very editorially intensive, so is not possible in all cases, but if you have a product to sell and you include a text description, images showing individual features and a video clip of the product in use, this will not only constitute a better sales pitch, it will also allow users to pick the content type that works best for them.

It is also important to try and avoid making mixed content distracting. As previously mentioned, a solution for one user may be a hindrance to another. Sensible designs and interactions are key here. If you are mixing text with images perhaps separate the two rather than interspersing the images within the text. Display the images in a slideshow rather than showing them all at once, and try and provide the same information with images alone. A user can then choose to read the text or go through the slideshow to get the same content.

Conclusions

You may think that a lot of the points made in this article are nothing more than common sense, and you would be absolutely right! The good news is that the best strategy for creating a site accessible to those with cognitive or learning difficulties is to provide clear and straight forward content in an easy to use interface with few distractions. This is what we want to provide our users with in most circumstances anyway, so it only takes a little more care and thought to avoid the pit falls.

The benefits go beyond what is traditionally thought of as accessibility as well. Something as simple as good grammar can greatly increase comprehension, especially for readers who are not fluent in the language a document is written in.

There is some bad news unfortunately – a single interface or style of content is never going to be able to cater for all users in all circumstances. This gives further weight to the idea of exposing content via a good API or feed. The same content can be repurposed for display in a different format, on other web sites, or on devices such as mobile phones.

Research Study: Children's songs, clapping games improve motor and cognitive skills

Study: Children's songs, clapping games improve motor and cognitive skills

Children's songs and clapping games can develop a person's motor and cognitive skills even long after childhood, a recent Israeli study suggests.

The study, by Dr. Idit Solkin of Ben-Gurion University's arts faculty, found a direct link between children's songs and clapping games and the development of important skills, both in children and in young adults, including university students.

Study Period
Solkin conducted the study over a period of five years by interviewing school and kindergarten teachers and visiting their classrooms, where she joined the children in singing. Her original goal was to figure out why children are fascinated by singing and clapping up until the end of third grade, when these pastimes are abruptly abandoned and replaced with sport.

"This fact explains a natural evolutionary process the children are going through," she said. "The clapping and singing games appear naturally in children's lives around the age of seven, and disappear around the age of 10. In this narrow window, these activities serve as a developmental tool that reflects many of the children's needs - emotional, sociological, physiological and cognitive. It's a transition stage that leads them to the next phases of growing up."

Motor and Cognitive Skills
Though the relationship between music and intellectual development in children has been studied extensively - prompting countless parents to obtain a Mozart record or two for their young, just in case - Solkin said that no in-depth study had previously been made of the effect that singing and clapping games have on children's motor and cognitive skills.

"We found that about 20 percent of children in the first, second and third grade take up these songs and demonstrate skills absent in children who don't take part in such activities," she said. "We found that children who clap and sing write better, with fewer spelling errors and nicer handwriting. Their teachers also believe their social integration is better than that of children who don't take part in these games."

School Study
As part of the study, Solkin went to several elementary school classrooms and engaged the children in singing and clapping activities over a period of 10 weeks. "Within a very short period of time, the children who until then hadn't taken part in such activities caught up in their cognitive abilities to those who did," she said.

This finding led Solkin to conclude that singing and clapping games should be made an integral part of education for children aged six to 10, for the purpose of motor and cognitive training.

University Students
She also found that singing and clapping games have a clear effect on adults: University students who filled out her questionnaires reported that after taking up such games, they became more focused and less tense.

"These techniques are associated with childhood, and many adults treat them as a joke," she said. "But once they take them up, they report feeling more alert and in a better mood."

Research Claims No link between dyslexia and lack of musical ability

No link between dyslexia and lack of musical ability

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 Jos- 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.

Cognitive Subtypes of Dyslexia

Different theories conceptualise dyslexia as either a phonological, attentional, auditory, magnocellular, or automatisation deficit. Such heterogeneity suggests the existence of yet unrecognised subtypes of dyslexics suffering from distinguishable deficits.

The purpose of the study was to identify cognitive subtypes of dyslexia. Out of 642 children screened for reading ability 49 dyslexics and 48 controls were tested for phonological awareness, auditory discrimination, motion detection, visual attention, and rhythm imitation.

A combined cluster and discriminant analysis approach revealed three clusters of dyslexics with different cognitive deficits. Compared to reading-unimpaired children cluster no. 1 had worse phonological awareness; cluster no. 2 had higher attentional costs; cluster no. 3 performed worse in the phonological, auditory, and magnocellular tasks.

These results indicate that dyslexia may result from distinct cognitive impairments. As a consequence, prevention and remediation programmes should be specifically targeted for the individual child's deficit pattern.

Read the full article in PDF

The empathy imbalance hypothesis of autism: a theoretical approach to cognitive and emotional empathy in autistic development

The empathy imbalance hypothesis of autism: a theoretical approach to cognitive and emotional empathy in autistic development. - Free Online Library

Autism
Autism is a pervasive developmental disability resulting from a neurological disorder that affects the normal functioning of the brain. It is characterised by the abnormal development of communication skills, social skills, and reasoning.

Pervasive Developmental Disorder
Any of several disorders, such as autism and Asperger's syndrome, characterised by severe deficits in many areas of development, including social interaction and communication, or by the presence of repetitive, that continues to fascinate researchers, challenge clinicians, and distress affected families.
Empathy
Empathy is a set of processes and outcomes at the heart of human social behaviour.

Social Behaviour
In biology, psychology and sociology social behaviour is behaviour directed towards, or taking place between, members of the same species. Behaviour such as predation which involves members of different species is not social. Fascination with autism is often with the study of empathy because the prevailing theory suggests that people with autism lack empathy.

For example, according to Decety and Jackson (2004), "Children with autism ... display a broad range of social communication deficits, and most scholars agree that a lack of empathy prominently figures amongst them" (p. 90).

The empathy imbalance hypothesis (EIH - External Interrupt Handler ) of autism, in keeping with the theory of mind hypothesis (Baron-Cohen, 1995), proposes that autism involves a significant cognitive empathy (CE) deficit.

However, the hypothesis also proposes, in contrast to prevailing theory, that people with autism actually have a heightened capacity for basic emotional empathy (EE). This combination of a CE deficit and an excess of EE can be termed EE-dominated empathic.

Read the full article here...........