Dogs helping children to read - Cesar Milan

I'm Listening!

Lately, there have been a number of programs springing up around the world where young children and older children with learning disabilities have been entered into programs where they have been reading to dogs. Dogs, you say?

While our canine brethren have been enthusiasts of running about wildly, chasing the Frisbee, swimming, and many other athletic pursuits, it’s been rare that they’ve been regarded by us humans as any meaningful participant in a literary salon.

The vast majority of pooches haven’t even read Old Yeller, The Call of the Wild, or even Marley and Me.

Yet, these four-legged critics are being enlisted to hear recitations of Dr. Seuss, Hans Christian Andersen, and J.K. Rowling in schools and libraries everywhere, where previously they might not even have been let through the door due to various hygiene considerations. So what’s going on?

Studies have begun to show that children who read to an audience perform much better when the audience is a dog as opposed to an adult human or a group of human peers.

The theory is that because the dog (usually a trained therapy dog) is attentive and nonjudgmental, the child feels more comfortable working through any difficulties sounding out the words or assembling the sentences conceptually knowing the dog won’t mock or laugh, but only support.

For children who are beginning to read, or are a little behind developmentally, or suffer from dyslexia, autism, or learning disabilities, an environment with a friendly companion like a professional therapy dog (or even a well-trained family pet) can create a safe atmosphere where they can work out their difficulties but not feel trivialised by classroom peers or fear disapproval of adult authority figures.

The use of dogs to provide encouragement to improve literacy can’t solve all problems associated with learning disabilities. Other educational techniques must be used in conjunction with reading to dogs to help overcome whatever challenges the reader faces, and it avoids the embarrassment of making mistakes in front of other people.

Dogs relieve the social pressure for the beginning reader to “get it right.” Dogs will enjoy the story even if the words are mispronounced or the delivery is halted. The dog won’t laugh and won’t make wisecracks if the reader makes mistakes and the dog’s attention and lack of judgment will hopefully help the reader keep moving forward and improving.

Recent studies have shown the improvements in the “dog readers” outshine the ones who don’t read to dogs.

A personal note from Cesar Milan: 'When my nephews were young and learning to read, a common holiday pastime was to ask them to come out and read a book to me. They were usually told for encouragement and aspiration that their uncle made his living reading and writing and he would be really excited to see how good they were (so, no pressure!). And my nephews, who had horsed around with me all day, giggled about everything, and been generally relaxed, sat down on the couch next to me, cracked open a storybook and began to read.'

'They would sit stiffly and read in trembling voices, with fearful glances at me to see if they had said the words correctly. It was painful, like watching a hostage read a prepared statement. I told them not to worry, that I thought they were awesome and you know, I still screwed up words, too and I think they kind of believed me. But still, I couldn’t say it like a dog could.'

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All school, no play? Kids' learning suffers without a recess

When Deborah Gilboa's second-oldest son Nadav started coming home from first grade with discipline warnings from his teacher, Gilboa and her husband were perplexed.

Nadav, who had just turned 6, had the same teacher in kindergarten and had rarely gotten into trouble.

So Gilboa, a medicine doctor in Pittsburgh who consults at Deborahgilboamd.com, and her husband sat down to ask their son what was going on. He had the answer right away.

"He said, 'In kindergarten we had recess twice a day and we went to gym twice a week,'" Gilboa told LiveScience. Now, as a first-grader, Nadav's class only went to gym once every six days.

They had one recess period a day, split with lunch, so that Nadav had only about 15 minutes a day to run around.

"He said, 'I get this feeling in my legs when they want to run and that feeling moves up to my belly and when that feeling moves up to my head I can't remember what the rules are," Gilboa said. "So he had really noticed a big change in his own behaviour and self-control."

For children like Nadav, the transition from summer freedom to the grindstone of the classroom may be tough. With schools under pressure to meet standardised testing goals, recess has been cut back and even eliminated in some school districts.

The irony, experts say, is that schools may be shooting themselves in the foot by taking away playtime that's crucial to a child's growth.

Autism risks amended for siblings - higher than thought

A new study suggests nearly one in five children with an autistic older sibling will develop the disorder too — a rate much higher than previously thought.

Researchers followed 664 infants who had at least one older brother or sister with autism. Overall, 132 infants or about 19 percent ended up with an autism diagnosis, too, by their third birthdays. Previous smaller or less diverse studies reported a prevalence of between 3 percent and 14 percent.

"We were all a bit surprised and taken aback about how high it is," said lead author Sally Ozonoff, a psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor with the Mind Institute at the University of California at Davis.

The highest rates were in infants who had at least two older siblings with autism — 32 percent of them also developed autism. Also, among boys with autistic siblings — 26 percent developed autism versus 9 percent of girls. Autism is already known to be more common in boys.

The study involved 12 U.S. and Canadian sites and was published online Monday in Pediatrics. Earlier studies were more local or involved fewer sites.

Ozonoff said parents of autistic children often ask her, "How likely am I to have another child" with autism? She said her study provides a more up-to-date answer.

However, Ozonoff noted that 80 percent of siblings studied did not develop autism, and that the prevalence rate was an average. It may be different for each family, depending on other risk factors they may face.

Autism has no known cause but experts believe that genetics and external influences are involved. Research is examining whether these could include infections, pollution and other non-inherited problems. Ozonoff noted that siblings often are exposed to similar outside influences, which could partly explain the study results.

Infants in the study were enrolled before they showed any signs of autism, such as poor eye contact and little social interaction.

The study is an important addition to autism research and "has critical implications for families who are deciding whether they'll have another child," said Catherine Lord, director of the Institute for Brain Development at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Lord was not involved in the study.

Kathleen Lanese of Kings Park, N.Y., says having one son with autism didn't make her think twice about trying to have another child, even though she knew there was a chance the second would be affected, too.

"We wanted another child and we were going to take whoever we got," said Lanese, who was not involved in the study. Still, when her younger son was a baby, she says she "watched him like a hawk" for autism signs. He was diagnosed with autism at 16 months, earlier than her older boy.

Ozonoff said the study should prompt families and their children's doctors to be vigilant with infants whose older siblings have autism. Early diagnosis is important because experts say behavioral treatment has the best chance of working if started early.

"Pediatricians need to listen and make a very focused plan for how to monitor those things, rather than taking a wait-and-see attitude" toward children with autistic siblings, Ozonoff said.

Alycia Halladay, a research director at the advocacy group Autism Speaks, said the study provides a more robust, accurate prevalence estimate than previous studies, and strengthens the idea that family history is a risk factor.

Her group, the National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Institute for Health Research are among those who paid for the study.

___

Online:

American Academy of Pediatrics: http://www.aap.org

National Institutes of Health: http://health.nih.gov/topic/Autism

Profound reorganisation in brains of adults who stutter

Hearing Beethoven while reciting Shakespeare can suppress even a King's stutter, as recently illustrated in the movie "The King's Speech."

This dramatic but short-lived effect of hiding the sound of one's own speech indicates that the integration of hearing and motor functions plays some role in the fluency (or dysfluency) of speech.

New research has shown that in adults who have stuttered since childhood, the processes of auditory-motor integration are indeed located in a different part of the brain to those in adults who do not stutter.

The findings are reported in the September 2011 issue of Elsevier's Cortex.

Dr. Nicole Neef and Dr. Martin Sommer from the University of Goettingen, together with Dr. Bettina Pollok from the University of Duesseldorf, studied the performance of a group of adults who stutter, as well as a control group of adults who do not stutter, in a finger tapping exercise.

They used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to interfere temporarily with brain activity in the dorsolateral premotor cortex while the participants tapped their fingers in time with the clicks of a metronome.

In control subjects, disturbing the left premotor cortex impaired the finger tapping, but disturbing the right premotor cortex had no effect. In stuttering adults, the pattern was reversed: the accuracy of finger tapping was affected by disturbing the right hemisphere, and unaffected when disturbing the left.

Previous research has already linked stuttering with a right-shifted cerebral blood flow in the motor and premotor areas during speech. In this new study, a shift of auditory-motor integration to the right side of the brain occurred even in a task not directly involving speech.

Thus, in the brains of adults who stutter there appears to be a profound reorganisation possibly compensating for subtle white matter disturbances in other parts of the brain -- the left inferior frontal regions. These findings shed light on the extent of the reorganisation of brain functions in persistent developmental stuttering.

Profound reorganization in brains of adults who stutter: Auditory-motor integration located in different part of brain

People With Dyslexia Have Difficulty Not Just Reading Words, But Recognizing Voices

While most people think of dyslexia as primarily a problem with reading, people with dyslexia seem to have trouble processing the spoken language, as well. A new study published last week Science found that people with dyslexia have a harder time recognizing voices than other people do.
How the Heck:

• Participants in the study–half of whom were dyslexic–watched and listened to cartoon characters on a computer. Each character had a distinct voice, and spoke either English, the participants’ native language, or Mandarin Chinese.
• The participants were then played a clip of each voice and asked to match it to the correct character.
• People without reading difficulties were better at recognizing voices speaking their native language. They could correctly pick out which character went with a voice about two-thirds of the time if the voice was speaking English, and only about half the time if it was speaking Mandarin.
• Dyslexics, on the other hand, showed no native language boost. It didn’t matter if a voice was speaking English or Mandarin: they correctly matched it with a character around half the time either way.

What’s the Context:

• Researchers are increasingly finding that reading problems, while the most well known feature of dyslexia, are just a part of what’s going on. People with dyslexia have difficulty in processing and combining the sounds of language—and, when reading, correctly linking them to letters on a page.
• This study underscores the idea that people with dyslexia have trouble processing phonemes, the units of sound that make up speech—and that differ slightly between different voices, helping us to recognize who’s talking.

The Future Holds:

• Understanding the mental roots of dyslexia could help researchers develop early interventions, helping children who have trouble processing language even before they start school.
• Since children start to recognize voices long before they learn to read, some variation on a voice-recognition test could help identify children who might develop dyslexia.

Reference: Tyler K. Perrachione, Stephanie N. Del Tufo, & John D. E. Gabrieli. “Human Voice Recognition Depends on Language Ability.” Science, July 29, 2011. DOI: 10.1126/science.1207327

Footbridge Interactive Intro to Reading Bridges - YouTube

Up to 10% of all children can be placed somewhere along the dyslexic spectrum. Linda O’ Sullivan first became concerned when her own son, Oisín, was seen to be having difficulties at school. He was having problems with with reading fluency and comprehension and was beginning to fall behind his classmates.

Oisín was diagnosed as having dyslexia and Linda took him along to the Dyslexic Support Centre in Limerick.

The Centre was founded by Marie Stubbings who works with evidence based teaching and intervention methods for children who are dyslexic. Using a number of different teaching intervention methods she worked with Oisin on a number of different levels and according to Linda, “His reading improved quite a lot during that time.”

It occurred to Linda that, “These exercises would work very well in a game based environment driven by an animated story.” When she looked around she found there was nothing available.

“Children... need something where their attitudes towards reading and learning become more positive. Kids in that situation can often develop negative attitudes towards learning whereas in a games environment kids can become more positive and use that positive energy for learning.”

Linda initially thought about using her ideas as the basis for a possible PhD research project. However, after speaking to the University of Limerick and NUI Galway she realised that her ideas were more suited to a business project.

“I really felt because I was on my own I needed the structure of some business support and the business development expertise of pulling the finance together.” So she enrolled on the Limerick Enterprise Acceleration Platform (LEAP) which is housed in the Hartnett Enterprise Acceleration Centre in the grounds of the Limerick Institute of Technology.

“I picked up a lot of knowledge and also because a lot of the businesses in there are technical there are a lot of techies in the building.

That was helpful to me to get up and running in the business. It was in there as well that I met Jennifer Keane who became my partner in the business.

The program suited my needs exceptionally well.”

The 12 months that Linda spent on the program allowed her to put together a business plan, to market research and bring together an educational advisory panel. The prototype of the product was developed and testing was done with dyslexic children.

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