Dyslexia: Ranking the effectiveness of a range of interventions

How can we best treat dyslexia? 

A new meta-analysis of published data, carried out by researchers at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), now provides a means of ranking the effectiveness of a range of current interventions.

Gerd Schulte-Körne

A research group led by Professor Gerd Schulte-Körne, Director of the Clinic of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at LMU Munich, has systematically evaluated data from published randomized controlled treatment studies of dyslexia.

The results of their investigation were recently been published in the online journal PLoS One.

The term dyslexia refers to a specific difficulty in learning to read and spell. It affects 5-10% of school children and although it is one of the most common learning disorders of childhood and adolescence, it also affects adults.

Indeed, the condition is often diagnosed relatively late. "Up to 40% of children who show signs of dyslexia also have psychological problems, which often result from discrimination provoked by their learning difficulties.

They are often confronted with comments such as: 'You're just too lazy' or 'You have to work harder'", says Prof. Schulte-Körne.

Furthermore, affected children and their families are often left to cope with the problem on their own, because nobody is responsible for providing support for them beyond the confines of the classroom.

Many popular 'therapies' are, at best, ineffective and some are downright bogus.

"Early intervention and appropriate therapeutic measures that take into account the specific nature of each individual case are urgently needed", says Prof. Schulte-Körne, pointing out that the curriculum offered in normal schools is often insufficient in helping children with severe dyslexia to overcome their disability.

"These children do not receive the necessary attention because school resources are inadequate and teachers are not sufficiently well trained to deal with the problem."

Katharina Galuschka

"More than 20 different 'treatment' methods have been developed which purport to help dyslexic children but in fact very few of them have any real effect," says Katharina Galuschka, who carried out the meta-analysis.

"Systematic training of the very basic process of relating the sound of a word to its orthographic form turns out to be particularly important."

The new study also shows that long-term interventions are significantly more effective than short-term training measures.

In addition, the study reveals that many popular methods which concentrate on single factors such as enhancing visual scanning of text, or improving auditory perception, are ineffective.

"Cognition-enhancing medication or the use of tinted lenses are also unable to improve the reading ability of dyslexic subjects."

"This the first meta-analysis of its kind and it provides a basis for formulating urgently needed guidelines for dyslexia treatment and therapy", Prof. Schulte-Körne explains.

He and his research group are now coordinating a set of medical guidelines for the treatment of dyslexia in Germany, due to be released shortly.

More information: Galuschka K, Ise E, Krick K, Schulte-Körne G (2014) "Effectiveness of Treatment Approaches for Children and Adolescents with Reading Disabilities: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials." PLoS ONE 9(2): e89900. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0089900

Effectiveness of Automatic Speech Recognition Software (ASR)

MOST of us talk to our computers, if only to curse them when a glitch destroys hours of work. Sadly the computer doesn't usually listen, but new kinds of software are being developed that make conversing with a computer rather more productive.

The longest established of these is automatic speech recognition (ASR), the technology that converts the spoken word to text. More recently it has been joined by subtler techniques that go beyond what you say, and analyse how you say it. Between them they could help us communicate more effectively in situations where face-to-face conversation is not possible.

ASR has come a long way since 1964, when visitors to the World's Fair in New York were wowed by a device called the IBM Shoebox, which performed simple arithmetic calculations in response to voice commands. Yet people's perceptions of the usefulness of ASR have, if anything, diminished.

"State-of-the-art ASR has an error rate of 30 to 35 per cent," says Simon Tucker at the University of Sheffield, UK, "and that's just very annoying." Its shortcomings are highlighted by the plethora of web pages poking fun at some of the mistakes made by Google Voice, which turns voicemail messages into text.

What's more, even when ASR gets it right the results can be unsatisfactory, as simply transcribing what someone says often makes for awkward reading. People's speech can be peppered with repetition, or sentences that just tail off.

"Even if you had perfect transcription of the words, it's often the case that you still couldn't tell what was going on," says Alex Pentland, who directs the Human Dynamics Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "People's language use is very indirect and idiomatic," he points out.

Despite these limitations, ASR has its uses, says Tucker. With colleagues at Sheffield and Steve Whittaker at IBM Research in Almaden, California, he has developed a system called Catchup, designed to summarise in almost real time what has been said at a business meeting so the latecomers can... well, catch up with what they missed. Catchup is able to identify the important words and phrases in an ASR transcript and edit out the unimportant ones.

It does so by using the frequency with which a word appears as an indicator of its importance, having first ruled out a "stop list" of very common words. It leaves the text surrounding the important words in place to put them in context, and removes the rest.

A key feature of Catchup is that it then presents the result in audio form, so the latecomer hears a spoken summary rather than having to plough through a transcript. "It provides a much better user experience," says Tucker.

Read the full article here ....