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By Katie Hafner NEW HAVEN, Conn. — By now, Sally and Bennett Shaywitz might have retired to a life of grandchild-doting and Mediterranean-cruising. Instead, the Shaywitzes — experts in dyslexia at Yale who have been married to each other for 55 years — remain as focused as ever on a research endeavor they began 35 years ago. Sally, 76, and Bennett, 79, both academic physicians, run the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. Their goal is not just to widen understanding of the scientific underpinnings of dyslexia, the most common learning disorder in the United States, but to push for public policies aligned with that knowledge. For years, dyslexia was largely misunderstood as a reading problem that caused children to reverse letters, and often was seen as a sign of laziness, stupidity or bad vision. The Shaywitzes’ work has shown there is no link between dyslexia and intelligence, and that dyslexia is not something one outgrows. Their research has found that it affects one in five people, yet even now many never receive a formal diagnosis. “There is an epidemic of reading failure that we have the scientific evidence to treat effectively and yet we are not acknowledging,” Sally said. Working from unprepossessing offices on the Yale School of Medicine campus, the Shaywitzes are now updating one of their signal achievements, a study they started in 1983 following 445 five-year-olds in Connecticut. It was the first study to examine reading continually from childhood through adulthood. The Connecticut Longitudinal Study, or C.L.S., has not only established the prevalence of dyslexia but also has demonstrated that it affects boys and girls in roughly equal numbers. The couple recently began a new phase of the study, administering reading tests to 375 of the participants, who are now in their 40s. They have no planned completion date. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25480 - Posted: 09.22.2018

Diana King, a Leading Teacher in Overcoming Dyslexia, Dies at 90

By Sam Roberts Diana Hanbury King, a master teacher who helped generations of students struggling to read fluently, write and spell — and being stigmatized for it — because of an often undiagnosed learning disability called dyslexia, died on June 15 at her home in Lakeville, Conn. She was 90. The cause was complications from several falls, her son, Christopher, said. Ms. King, whose uncle was dyslexic, taught, tutored, founded camps and trained teachers in education programs that were replicated around the world. “The time to diagnose dyslexia is before the child has a chance to fail at reading,” she said. She was instrumental in transforming the popular perception of people with dyslexia from being backward or unteachable to being often highly intelligent despite their learning difficulties. Often they were endowed with keen powers of observation and original thinking, innate charm, a sense of balance and high energy. “We continue to see the tragedy of a bright child coming home from school in the second or third grade in tears — ‘I’m the dumbest kid in all of the second grade’ — and getting stomach aches before they go to school, and all of this totally unnecessary and totally preventable, ” Ms. King said in a videotaped interview with the International Dyslexia Association in 2013. “It drives me crazy.” She said that dyslexia affects as many as one in five people and can be detected by age 4. (A child’s saying “washerdisher,” for example, or “flutteryby” can be symptomatic.) But through intensive tutoring, she maintained — learning a few letters at a time, and integrating spelling and handwriting into their curriculum — students can pass standardized tests or even surpass their peers by the fourth grade. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 25129 - Posted: 06.23.2018

Rethinking How Students With Dyslexia Are Taught To Read

Emily Hanford Dyslexia is the most common learning disability, affecting tens of millions of people in the United States. But getting help for children who have it in public school can be a nightmare. "They wouldn't acknowledge that he had a problem," says Christine Beattie about her son Neil. "They wouldn't say the word 'dyslexia.' " Other parents, she says, in the Upper Arlington, Ohio, schools were having the same problem. The district in a suburb of Columbus wasn't identifying their children's dyslexia or giving them appropriate help. So, in 2011, the parents pooled their resources and hired a lawyer. "I was not surprised there was a group of students with dyslexia who were not getting the kind of instruction that they really needed," says Kerry Agins, an Ohio special education attorney who represented the Upper Arlington parents. She says the issue of public schools failing to address the needs of students with dyslexia is widespread, in Ohio and across the country. Agins advised the parents to file a group complaint against the district. Parents typically fight special education cases alone, seeking remedies one by one. But a group complaint, Agins told them, could force the school system to make broader change. Nineteen people signed the complaint, including parents, students and graduates of the Upper Arlington public schools. © 2018 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 24738 - Posted: 03.12.2018

Dyslexia: scientists claim cause of condition may lie in the eyes

French scientists claim they may have found a physiological, and seemingly treatable, cause for dyslexia hidden in tiny light-receptor cells in the human eye. In people with the condition, the cells were arranged in matching patterns in both eyes, which may be to blame for confusing the brain by producing “mirror” images, the co-authors wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. In non-dyslexic people, the cells are arranged asymmetrically, allowing signals from the one eye to be overridden by the other to create a single image in the brain. “Our observations lead us to believe that we indeed found a potential cause of dyslexia,” said the study’s co-author, Guy Ropars, of the University of Rennes. It offers a “relatively simple” method of diagnosis, he added, by simply looking into a subject’s eyes. Furthermore, “the discovery of a delay (of about 10 thousandths of a second) between the primary image and the mirror image in the opposing hemispheres of the brain, allowed us to develop a method to erase the mirror image that is so confusing for dyslexic people” – using an LED lamp. Like being left- or right-handed, human beings also have a dominant eye. As most of us have two eyes, which record slightly different versions of the same image, the brain has to select one of the two, creating a “non-symmetry”. Many more people are right-eyed than left, and the dominant eye has more neural connections to the brain than the weaker one. Image signals are captured with rods and cones in the eye – the cones being responsible for colour. © 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Link ID: 24208 - Posted: 10.18.2017

Dyslexia: The Learning Disability That Must Not Be Named

Gabrielle Emanuel Megan Lordos, a middle school teacher, says she was not allowed to use the word "dyslexia." She's not alone. Parents and teachers across the country have raised concerns about some schools hesitating, or completely refusing, to say the word. As the most common learning disability in the U.S., dyslexia affects somewhere between 5 and 17 percent of the population. That means millions of school children around the country struggle with it. Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), schools are required to provide special services to help these students — things like reading tutors and books on tape. But those special services can be expensive, and many schools don't have the resources to provide these accommodations. That has led some parents and advocates to worry that some schools are making a careful calculation: If they don't acknowledge the issue — or don't use the word "dyslexia" — then they are not obligated to provide services. Last year, when Lordos was teaching English at a public school in Arlington, Va., she recalls a parent-teacher meeting in the conference room. Things started smoothly. Lordos says two parents had come in to talk with teachers and administrators about their son – Lordos' student, an eighth-grader – who was struggling to read. Partway through the meeting, Lordos says she suggested that the student might have orthographic dyslexia. Two of Lordos' own children have dyslexia and, she says, she noticed her student had similar challenges to the ones she'd seen at home. © 2016 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 22949 - Posted: 12.05.2016

Millions Have Dyslexia, Few Understand It

Gabrielle Emanuel "It's frustrating that you can't read the simplest word in the world." Thomas Lester grabs a book and opens to a random page. He points to a word: galloping. "Goll—. G—. Gaa—. Gaa—. G—. " He keeps trying. It is as if the rest of the word is in him somewhere, but he can't sound it out. "I don't ... I quit." He tosses the book and it skids along the table. Despite stumbling over the simplest words, Thomas – a 4th grader – is a bright kid. In fact, that's an often-misunderstood part of dyslexia: It's not about lacking comprehension, having a low IQ or being deprived of a good education. It's about having a really hard time reading. Dyslexia is the most common learning disability in the United States. It touches the lives of millions of people, including me and Thomas. Just like Thomas, I spent much of my childhood sitting in a little chair across from a reading tutor. Today, Thomas is working with his tutor in an office building on the northwest side of Washington, D.C. The suite they're in is an oasis of white couches and overstuffed pillows. In the waiting area, a kid is curled up sucking her thumb, and a mom reads a magazine quietly. In the back of the suite — a Lindamood Bell Reading Center — Thomas fidgets with everything in arm's reach. "Alright, I am going to give you some air-writing words," the tutor says to Thomas, speaking rapidly as if daring Thomas to keep pace. She spells the first one out loud: "C-O-R-T." With his index finger, Thomas writes the letters sloppily in the air. Then, his tutor asks a question: What sound do the two middle letters make? "Eer? Aar?" Thomas squints at whatever visual memory he can retain from the letters he's just scribbled in the air. Then, with a burst of enthusiasm, he stumbles on the answer: "Or!" © 2016 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 22918 - Posted: 11.28.2016

Brain stimulation in children spurs hope — and concern

Linda Geddes Jack struggled in regular school. Diagnosed with dyslexia and the mathematical equivalent, dyscalculia, as well as the movement disorder dyspraxia, Jack (not his real name) often misbehaved and played the class clown. So the boy’s parents were relieved when he was offered a place at Fairley House in London, which specializes in helping children with learning difficulties. Fairley is also possibly the first school in the world to have offered pupils the chance to undergo electrical brain stimulation. The stimulation was done as part of an experiment in which twelve eight- to ten-year-olds, including Jack, wore an electrode-equipped cap while they played a video game. Neuroscientist Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford, UK, who led the pilot study in 2013, is one of a handful of researchers across the world who are investigating whether small, specific areas of a child’s brain can be safely stimulated to overcome learning difficulties. “It would be great to be able to understand how to deliver effective doses of brain stimulation to kids’ brains, so that we can get ahead of developmental conditions before they really start to hold children back in their learning,” says psychologist Nick Davis of Swansea University, UK. The idea of using magnets or electric currents to treat psychiatric or learning disorders — or just to enhance cognition — has generated a flurry of excitement over the past ten years. The technique is thought to work by activating neural circuits or by making it easier for neurons to fire. The research is still in its infancy, but at least 10,000 adults have undergone such stimulation, and it seems to be safe — at least in the short term. One version of the technology, called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat migraine and depression in adults. © 2015 Nature Publishing Group,

Forget colour overlays – dyslexia is not a vision problem

by Clare Wilson A new study has discredited the theory that dyslexia is caused by visual problems. So what does cause the condition and how can it be treated? What kind of visual problems are claimed to cause dyslexia? A huge variety. They include difficulties in merging information from both eyes, problems with glare from white pages or the text blurring or "dancing" on the page. A host of products claim to relieve this so-called visual stress, especially products that change the background colour of the page, such as tinted glasses and coloured overlays. Others advise eye exercises that supposedly help people with dyslexia track words on the page. Despite lack of evidence that these approaches work, some people with dyslexia say they help – more than half of university students with dyslexia have used such products. What are the new findings? That there's no evidence visual stress is linked with dyslexia. Nearly 6000 UK children aged between 7 and 9 had their reading abilities tested as well as performing a battery of visual tests. About 3 per cent of them had serious dyslexia, in line with the national average. But in the visual tests, the differences between the students with and without dyslexia were minimal. In two of the 11 tests, about 16 per cent of the children with dyslexia scored poorly, compared with 10 per cent for children with normal reading abilities. But that small difference could be caused by the fact that they read less, says author Alexandra Creavin of the University of Bristol, UK. And more importantly, the 16 per cent figure is so low, it can't be the main explanation for dyslexia. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Dyslexia Can Deliver Benefits

|By Matthew H. Schneps Many of the etchings by artist M. C. Escher appeal because they depict scenes that defy logic. His famous “Waterfall” shows a waterwheel powered by a cascade pouring down from a brick flume. Water turns the wheel and is redirected uphill back to the mouth of the flume, where it can once again pour over the wheel in an endless cycle. The drawing shows us an impossible situation that violates nearly every law of physics. In 2003 a team of psychologists led by Catya von Károlyi of the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire made a discovery using such images. When the researchers asked people to pick out impossible figures from similarly drawn illustrations, they found that participants with dyslexia were among the fastest at this task. Dyslexia is often called a learning disability. And it can indeed present learning challenges. Although its effects vary widely, some children with dyslexia read so slowly that it would typically take them months to read the same number of words that their peers read in a day. Therefore, the fact that people with this difficulty were so adept at rapidly picking out the impossible figures puzzled von Károlyi. The researchers had stumbled on a potential upside to dyslexia, one that investigators have just begun to understand. Scientists had long suspected dyslexia might be linked to creativity, but laboratory evidence for this was rare. In the years to follow, sociologist Julie Logan of Cass Business School in London showed that there is a higher incidence of dyslexia among entrepreneurs than in the general population. Meanwhile cognitive scientist Gadi Geiger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people with dyslexia could attend to multiple auditory inputs at once. © 2015 Scientific American

Does your baby have rhythm? Answer could predict reading disorders later in life

Jia You In the future, a nurse could determine whether a baby is likely to develop a reading disorder simply by attaching a few electrodes to its scalp and watching its brain waves respond to human speech. Such is the scenario suggested by a new study, which finds a potential biological indicator of how well preschool children perceive rhythm, an ability linked to language development. “It’s really impressive to work with children this young, who are not often looked at,” says Aniruddh Patel, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, who was not involved with the research. Spoken language consists of sound waves occurring over multiple timescales. A syllable, for example, takes place over a quarter of a second, while a sentence unfolds over a few seconds. To make sense of this complex auditory information, humans use rhythmic cues such as stress and pause to discern words and syllables. Adults and school-aged children with reading disorders, however, struggle to pick up on these rhythmic patterns. Scientists estimate that dyslexia and other reading disabilities plague about 5% to 10% of the population. Detecting such impairments early could lead to more effective intervention, but observing telltale signs in younger children who have not learned to read has proven a challenge. So biologist Nina Kraus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and her colleagues looked for automatic brain responses that can track language development in preschoolers, who have not learned to read. © 2014 American Association for the Advancement of Science

The Advantages of Dyslexia

|By Matthew H. Schneps “There are three types of mathematicians, those who can count and those who can’t.” Bad joke? You bet. But what makes this amusing is that the joke is triggered by our perception of a paradox, a breakdown in mathematical logic that activates regions of the brain located in the right prefrontal cortex. These regions are sensitive to the perception of causality and alert us to situations that are suspect or fishy — possible sources of danger where a situation just doesn’t seem to add up. Many of the famous etchings by the artist M.C. Escher activate a similar response because they depict scenes that violate causality. His famous “Waterfall” shows a water wheel powered by water pouring down from a wooden flume. The water turns the wheel, and is redirected uphill back to the mouth of the flume, where it can once again pour over the wheel, in an endless cycle. The drawing shows us a situation that violates pretty much every law of physics on the books, and our brain perceives this logical oddity as amusing — a visual joke. The trick that makes Escher’s drawings intriguing is a geometric construction psychologists refer to as an “impossible figure,” a line-form suggesting a three-dimensional object that could never exist in our experience. Psychologists, including a team led by Catya von Károlyi of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, have used such figures to study human cognition. When the team asked people to pick out impossible figures from similarly drawn illustrations that did not violate causality, they were surprised to discover that some people were faster at this than others. And most surprising of all, among those who were the fastest were those with dyslexia. © 2014 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 19978 - Posted: 08.20.2014

Portrait of a dyslexic artist, who transforms neurons into ‘butterflies’

BY Ellen Rolfes Rebecca Kamen’s sculptures appear as delicate as the brain itself. Thin, green branches stretch from a colorful mass of vein-like filaments. The branches, made from pieces of translucent mylar and stained with diluted acrylic paint, are so delicate that they sway slightly when mounted to the wall. Perched on various parts of the sculpture are mylar butterflies, whose wings also move, as if fluttering. One of Kamen's influences is the writing of Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who is called the "father of modern neuroscience." Cajal once said: “Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind." One of Kamen’s artistic influences is the writing of Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who is called the “father of modern neuroscience.” The work, called “Butterflies of the Soul” was inspired by neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who won the 1906 Nobel Prize, for his groundbreaking work on the human nervous system. Kamen’s sculpture is a nod to his work and the development of modern neuroscience. Cajal’s observation of the cells under the microscope radically changed how scientists study the brain and its functions, Kamen said. And the butterflies in her sculpture represent Cajal’s drawings of Purkinje cells, which are found in the cerebellar cortex at the base of the brain. Purkinje cells play an important role in motor control and in certain cognitive functions, such as attention and language. And attention and language are skills of great interest to Kamen, who has dyslexia. Her fascination with the brain and its structure deepened when she discovered that she was dyslexic later in life. © 1996 - 2014 MacNeil / Lehrer Productions.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 19503 - Posted: 04.17.2014

Dyslexia linked to brain communication breakdown

Helen Shen Dyslexia may be caused by impaired connections between auditory and speech centres of the brain, according to a study published today in Science1. The research could help to resolve conflicting theories about the root causes of the disorder, and lead to targeted interventions. When people learn to read, their brains make connections between written symbols and components of spoken words. But people with dyslexia seem to have difficulty identifying and manipulating the speech sounds to be linked to written symbols. Researchers have long debated whether the underlying representations of these sounds are disrupted in the dyslexic brain, or whether they are intact but language-processing centres are simply unable to access them properly. A team led by Bart Boets, a clinical psychologist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, analysed brain scans and found that phonetic representations of language remain intact in adults with dyslexia, but may be less accessible than in controls because of deficits in brain connectivity. "The authors took a really inventive and thoughtful approach," says John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "They got a pretty clear answer." Communication channels Boets and his team used a technique called multivoxel pattern analysis to study fine-scale brain signals as people listened to a battery of linguistic fragments such as 'ba' and 'da'. To the researchers' surprise, neural activity in the primary and secondary auditory cortices of participants with dyslexia showed consistently distinct signals for different sounds. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 19007 - Posted: 12.06.2013

Dyslexia 'seen in brain scans' of pre-school children

By Michelle Roberts Health editor, BBC News online Brain scans may allow detection of dyslexia in pre-school children even before they start to read, say researchers. A US team found tell-tale signs on scans that have already been seen in adults with the condition. And these brain differences could be a cause rather than a consequence of dyslexia - something unknown until now - the Journal of Neuroscience reports. Scans could allow early diagnosis and intervention, experts hope. The part of the brain affected is called the arcuate fasciculus. Among the 40 school-entry children they studied they found some had shrinkage of this brain region, which processes word sounds and language. They asked the same children to do several different types of pre-reading tests, such as trying out different sounds in words. Those children with a smaller arcuate fasciculus had lower scores. It is too early to say if the structural brain differences found in the study are a marker of dyslexia. The researchers plan to follow up groups of children as they progress through school to determine this. Lead researcher Prof John Gabrieli said: "We don't know yet how it plays out over time, and that's the big question. BBC © 2013

Video Games May Treat Dyslexia

By Michele Solis Attention training might trump language practice in treating dyslexia, and video games might provide just that, according to a recent study in Current Biology. Researchers at the University of Padua in Italy found that 10 kids with dyslexia who played an action-filled video game for nine 80-minute sessions increased their reading speed, without introducing mistakes. These reading gains lasted at least two months and outpaced gains measured in 10 children with dyslexia who played a nonaction version of the same game, as well as trumping the expected improvement that naturally occurs in a year for a child with dyslexia. Though small, the study bolsters evidence that dyslexia stems in part from problems in focusing attention onto letters and words in an orderly way. Last year the same team reported that preschoolers who struggled to quickly and accurately shift their attention—which can be thought of as a spotlight—were likely to have reading difficulties three years later. Because action video games require players to constantly redirect their attention to different targets, neuroscientist Simone Gori and his colleagues thought the video games might fine-tune that spotlight so as to avoid jumbling letters on a page. The training honed visual attention skills and reading hand in hand, and the reading improvements even exceeded those obtained in children after traditional therapies for dyslexia, which focus on building language skills. Gori does not advocate abandoning the older methods but says that training visual attention could be a vital, overlooked component. He also notes that kids are prone to quit traditional dyslexia therapies, which he says can be demanding and even boring; not a problem in his video-game experiment. “Our difficulty was in getting the kids to stop playing,” Gori says. © 2013 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 18450 - Posted: 08.03.2013

Video games take aim at dyslexia

By Bruce Bower Children with dyslexia may read better after playing action video games that stress mayhem, not literacy, a contested study suggests. Playing fast-paced Wii video games for 12 hours over two weeks markedly increased the reading speed of 7- to 13-year-old kids with dyslexia, with no loss of reading accuracy, says a team led by psychologist Andrea Facoetti of the University of Padua, Italy. Reading gains lasted at least two months after the video game sessions. The gains matched or exceeded previously reported effects of reading-focused programs for dyslexia, the researchers report online February 28 in Current Biology. “These results are clear enough to say that action video games are able to improve reading abilities in children with dyslexia,” Facoetti says. Although the new study includes only 20 children with dyslexia, its results build on earlier evidence that many poor readers have difficulty focusing on items within arrays, Facoetti holds. By strengthening the ability to monitor central and peripheral objects in chaotic scenes, he says, action video games give kids with dyslexia a badly needed tool for tracking successive letters in written words. But evidence for Facoetti’s conclusions is shaky, asserts psychologist Nicola Brunswick of Middlesex University in London. The researchers tested word reading ability two months later but failed to test reading comprehension, she says. What’s more, they did so with a mere six of 10 kids who played the action video games. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 17858 - Posted: 03.02.2013

Adults with dyslexia improve when pushed to read faster

Regina Nuzzo People with dyslexia are often taught to work through reading by ‘slowing down and sounding it out’. Results from a computerized training program, however, suggest that ‘hurrying up and getting on with it’ might be a better practice. Accelerated training could improve both reading fluency and comprehension, with lasting benefits. The training protocol speeds up reading by displaying a sentence and then systematically erasing it, letter by letter, in the direction of reading. It then asks questions to test the reader's comprehension. If the questions are answered correctly, the software moves on to the next sentence but gives the reader 2 milliseconds — the duration of an eyeblink — less reading time per letter. “We essentially tell the brain, ‘Hey, you can do better,’” says Zvia Breznitz, a psychologist at the University of Haifa in Israel and lead author of the study. “We slowly break the cycle of bad reading.” After training with the programme for three 20-minute sessions per week for two months, students with dyslexia read about 25% faster than before and comprehended more, even when allowed to read at their own pace. Their test scores ended up statistically indistinguishable from those of typical readers who had not gone through training, and the gains were still apparent six months after training ended. Typical readers also benefited from the training, but their gains were neither as significant nor as long-lasting as the dyslexics'. The findings are published today in Nature Communications1. “The results are exciting,” says Guinevere Eden, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Dyslexia is thought to affect between 5 and 10% of the world’s population2, but there is no gold-standard method for treating it. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 17799 - Posted: 02.13.2013

New Insights Into the Neuroscience of Dyslexia

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Most of us take the ability to read and write for granted. For some, however, these fundamental skills are difficult to master. Sadly, factors associated with the variety of symptoms that contribute to a diagnosis of dyslexia have remained obscure. New research may change this picture as researchers announce a major advancement toward understanding the cause of dyslexia. Neuroscientist Begoña Díaz, Ph.D., and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, have discovered an important neural mechanism underlying dyslexia. They believe problems arise in the part of the brain called the medial geniculate body in the thalamus. Experts believe this discovery can provide the basis for developing potential treatments for the condition. People who suffer from dyslexia have difficulties with identifying speech sounds in spoken language. For example, while most children are able to recognize whether two words rhyme even before they go to school, dyslexic children often cannot do this until late primary school age. Most people suffer from dyslexia for their whole lives although many learn to compensate. Experts say that between five and 10 percent of children suffer from dyslexia, yet very little is known about its causes. © 1992-2012 Psych Central

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 17143 - Posted: 08.11.2012

The Upside of Dyslexia

By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL THE word “dyslexia” evokes painful struggles with reading, and indeed this learning disability causes much difficulty for the estimated 15 percent of Americans affected by it. Since the phenomenon of “word blindness” was first documented more than a century ago, scientists have searched for the causes of dyslexia, and for therapies to treat it. In recent years, however, dyslexia research has taken a surprising turn: identifying the ways in which people with dyslexia have skills that are superior to those of typical readers. The latest findings on dyslexia are leading to a new way of looking at the condition: not just as an impediment, but as an advantage, especially in certain artistic and scientific fields. Dyslexia is a complex disorder, and there is much that is still not understood about it. But a series of ingenious experiments have shown that many people with dyslexia possess distinctive perceptual abilities. For example, scientists have produced a growing body of evidence that people with the condition have sharper peripheral vision than others. Gadi Geiger and Jerome Lettvin, cognitive scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used a mechanical shutter, called a tachistoscope, to briefly flash a row of letters extending from the center of a subject’s field of vision out to its perimeter. Typical readers identified the letters in the middle of the row with greater accuracy. Those with dyslexia triumphed, however, when asked to identify letters located in the row’s outer reaches. Mr. Geiger and Mr. Lettvin’s findings, which have been confirmed in several subsequent studies, provide a striking demonstration of the fact that the brain separately processes information that streams from the central and the peripheral areas of the visual field. Moreover, these capacities appear to trade off: if you’re adept at focusing on details located in the center of the visual field, which is key to reading, you’re likely to be less proficient at recognizing features and patterns in the broad regions of the periphery. © 2012 The New York Times Company

NIH-funded study finds dyslexia not tied to IQ

Regardless of high or low overall scores on an IQ test, children with dyslexia show similar patterns of brain activity, according to researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health. The results call into question the discrepancy model — the practice of classifying a child as dyslexic on the basis of a lag between reading ability and overall IQ scores. In many school systems, the discrepancy model is the criterion for determining whether a child will be provided with specialized reading instruction. With the discrepancy model, children with dyslexia and lower-than-average IQ scores may not be classified as learning disabled and so may not be eligible for special educational services to help them learn to read. "The study results indicate that the discrepancy model is not a valid basis for allocating special educational services in reading," said Brett Miller, Ph.D. The study findings were published online in Psychological Science. The study was conducted by Fumiko Hoeft, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford University. Originally, the U.S. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act required the use of the discrepancy model to identify those students who needed assistance for a learning disability. In the 1990s, studies showed that children who had difficulty learning to read had difficulty with phonological awareness — matching printed letters of the alphabet to the speech sounds that those letters represented. Based on these findings, the reauthorization of the Act dropped the requirement that school systems use the discrepancy model. Many school systems, however, retained the discrepancy model as a means to classify students needing special educational services in reading.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 15983 - Posted: 11.05.2011

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