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Identification of children at risk of dyslexia: The validity of teacher judgements using 'Phonic Phases'
We report an investigation of the validity of teachers' ratings of children's progress in 'phonics' as a screener for dyslexia. Seventy-three 6-year-olds from a whole school population were identified as 'at risk' of dyslexia according to teacher judgements of slow progression through phonic phases. Six months later, children's attainments in literacy and phonological skills were compared with those of their typically developing peers matched on age and gender. Teacher assessments of risk were related to individual differences in performance on a standardised test of reading ability. Teacher assessments overestimated 'risk of dyslexia', defined as below-average reading performance. However, teacher judgements, supplemented by tests of phoneme awareness and rapid naming, allowed a sensitive and specific identification of children who subsequently experienced reading difficulties. These findings show teachers can identify risk of dyslexia; the accuracy of this process can be improved by administering two tests of phonological skills. © 2011 UKLA.
Improving early language and literacy skills: differential effects of an oral language versus a phonology with reading intervention.
BACKGROUND: This study compares the efficacy of two school-based intervention programmes (Phonology with Reading (P + R) and Oral Language (OL)) for children with poor oral language at school entry. METHODS: Following screening of 960 children, 152 children (mean age 4;09) were selected from 19 schools on the basis of poor vocabulary and verbal reasoning skills and randomly allocated to either the P + R programme or the OL programme. Both groups of children received 20 weeks of daily intervention alternating between small group and individual sessions, delivered by trained teaching assistants. Children in the P + R group received training in letter-sound knowledge, phonological awareness and book level reading skills. Children in the OL group received instruction in vocabulary, comprehension, inference generation and narrative skills. The children's progress was monitored at four time points: pre-, mid- and post-intervention, and after a 5-month delay, using measures of literacy, language and phonological awareness. RESULTS: The data are clustered (children within schools) and robust confidence intervals are reported. At the end of the 20-week intervention programme, children in the P + R group showed an advantage over the OL group on literacy and phonological measures, while children in the OL group showed an advantage over the P + R group on measures of vocabulary and grammatical skills. These gains were maintained over a 5-month period. CONCLUSIONS: Intervention programmes designed to develop oral language skills can be delivered successfully by trained teaching assistants to children at school entry. Training using P + R fostered decoding ability whereas the OL programme improved vocabulary and grammatical skills that are foundations for reading comprehension. However, at the end of the intervention, more than 50% of at-risk children remain in need of literacy support.
Training phoneme blending skills in children with Down syndrome
This article reports the evaluation of a 6-week programme of teaching designed to support the development of phoneme blending skills in children with Down syndrome (DS). Teaching assistants (TAs) were trained to deliver the intervention to individual children in daily 10 -15-minute sessions, within a broader context of reading and language instruction. Ten children with Down syndrome (aged 6 years 11 months to 10 years 6 months) took part in the study; assessments of reading and phonological skills were completed at baseline, after an 8-week control period, and after 6-weeks of intervention. Children made significantly greater gains in phoneme blending skills and single word reading during the intervention period than in the control period. Thus, children with Down syndrome can make gains in blending skills, which may generalize to wider literacy skills, following targeted training over relatively short periods. © The Author(s) 2013.
A self-organizing model of the visual development of hand-centred representations.
We show how hand-centred visual representations could develop in the primate posterior parietal and premotor cortices during visually guided learning in a self-organizing neural network model. The model incorporates trace learning in the feed-forward synaptic connections between successive neuronal layers. Trace learning encourages neurons to learn to respond to input images that tend to occur close together in time. We assume that sequences of eye movements are performed around individual scenes containing a fixed hand-object configuration. Trace learning will then encourage individual cells to learn to respond to particular hand-object configurations across different retinal locations. The plausibility of this hypothesis is demonstrated in computer simulations.
Probing the neurochemical basis of synaesthesia using psychophysics.
The neurochemical mechanisms that contribute to synaesthesia are poorly understood, but multiple models implicate serotonin and GABA in the development of this condition. Here we used psychophysical tasks to test the predictions that synaesthetes would display behavioral performance consistent with reduced GABA and elevated serotonin in primary visual cortex. Controls and synaesthetes completed the orientation-specific surround suppression (OSSS) and tilt-after effect (TAE) tasks, previously shown to relate to GABA and serotonin levels, respectively. Controls and synaesthetes did not differ in the performance parameter previously associated with GABA or in the magnitude of the TAE. However, synaesthetes did display lower contrast difference thresholds in the OSSS task than controls when no surround (NS) was present. These results are inconsistent with the hypothesized roles of GABA and serotonin in this condition, but provide preliminary evidence that synaesthetes exhibit enhanced contrast discrimination.
ERP correlates of unexpected word forms in a picture-word study of infants and adults
We tested 14-month-olds and adults in an event-related potentials (ERPs) study in which pictures of familiar objects generated expectations about upcoming word forms. Expected word forms labelled the picture (word condition), while unexpected word forms mismatched by either a small deviation in word medial vowel height (mispronunciation condition) or a large deviation from the onset of the first speech segment (pseudoword condition). Both infants and adults showed sensitivity to both types of unexpected word form. Adults showed a chain of discrete effects: positivity over the N1wave, negativity over the P2wave (PMN effect) and negativity over the N2wave (N400 effect). Infants showed a similar pattern, including a robust effect similar to the adult P2effect. These observations were underpinned by a novel visualisation method which shows the dynamics of the ERP within bands of the scalp over time. The results demonstrate shared processing mechanisms across development, as even subtle deviations from expected word forms were indexed in both age groups by a reduction in the amplitude of characteristic waves in the early auditory evoked potential. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
It's not just what we encode, but how we encode it: Associations between neuroticism and learning
Objective: Neuroticism is a strong predictor of future mental health problems. The informativeness of this association has been questioned because of the limited understanding of the mechanisms underlying Neuroticism. In this article the authors extend our understanding of the association between information processing and Neuroticism. Method: Two independent studies involving separate sets of college students (N=89 and N=33), use self-rated Neuroticism scores to compare individuals' ability to learn simple and more complex discriminations, between simple shapes and words presented alone and in compound. Results: Neuroticism was found to be associated with differences in learning to discriminate simple stimuli from compounds containing the same simple stimuli. Individuals with high levels of Neuroticism appeared to process compounds of stimuli as whole units even when this ceased to be an effective strategy for learning. In contrast, individuals with lower levels of Neuroticism performed better with discriminations that could be solved while learning about separate stimuli, rather than compounds. Conclusions: The authors discuss possible mechanisms of learning identified by these tasks and consider what implications their observations have for an understanding of the relationship between Neuroticism and mental health problems. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Grooming and social cohesion in primates: a comment on Grueter et al.
Grueter et al. have recently claimed that grooming time in primates is best explained by terrestriality, which they take to be a proxy for hygiene demand. We suggest that their results arise from a confound between terrestriality and other aspects of sociality, combined with a number of conceptual and sampling problems. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Birth weight, head circumference, and prenatal exposure to acrylamide from maternal diet: the European prospective mother-child study (NewGeneris).
BACKGROUND: Acrylamide is a common dietary exposure that crosses the human placenta. It is classified as a probable human carcinogen, and developmental toxicity has been observed in rodents. OBJECTIVES: We examined the associations between prenatal exposure to acrylamide and birth outcomes in a prospective European mother-child study. METHODS: Hemoglobin (Hb) adducts of acrylamide and its metabolite glycidamide were measured in cord blood (reflecting cumulated exposure in the last months of pregnancy) from 1,101 singleton pregnant women recruited in Denmark, England, Greece, Norway, and Spain during 2006-2010. Maternal diet was estimated through food-frequency questionnaires. RESULTS: Both acrylamide and glycidamide Hb adducts were associated with a statistically significant reduction in birth weight and head circumference. The estimated difference in birth weight for infants in the highest versus lowest quartile of acrylamide Hb adduct levels after adjusting for gestational age and country was -132 g (95% CI: -207, -56); the corresponding difference for head circumference was -0.33 cm (95% CI: -0.61, -0.06). Findings were similar in infants of nonsmokers, were consistent across countries, and remained after adjustment for factors associated with reduced birth weight. Maternal consumption of foods rich in acrylamide, such as fried potatoes, was associated with cord blood acrylamide adduct levels and with reduced birth weight. CONCLUSIONS: Dietary exposure to acrylamide was associated with reduced birth weight and head circumference. Consumption of specific foods during pregnancy was associated with higher acrylamide exposure in utero. If confirmed, these findings suggest that dietary intake of acrylamide should be reduced among pregnant women.
The Learning Brain
Torkel Klingberg is one of the world's leading cognitive neuroscientists, but in this book he wears his erudition lightly, writing with simplicity and good humor as he shows us how to give our children the best chance to learn and grow.
Social anxiety, fear of negative evaluation and the detection of negative emotion in others.
The present study sought to investigate whether social anxiety is associated with enhanced ability to detect negative emotion in others. Subjects scoring high and low on Fear of Negative Evaluation (FNE) performed two tasks before and after a social threat induction. The first task involved identifying the affect (negative vs neutral) in briefly presented (60 msec) slides of faces. The second involved rating the overall emotion conveyed in brief video clips of an actor and detecting discrepancies in the affect conveyed by the visual and auditory channels of the video. Overall the results suggest that high social anxiety subjects have a bias towards identifying others' emotional expressions as negative in the absence of an enhanced ability to discriminate between different emotional states in others. Implications and limitations of the results are discussed.
Cognitive therapy in the treatment of anxiety disorders
In recent years, considerable progress has been made in developing effective cognitive treatments for anxiety disorders. This article provides an overview of the cognitive approach to anxiety disorders and a review of controlled trials in the area. Evidence available to date suggests that cognitive therapy is an effective treatment for panic disorder, social phobia, and generalized anxiety disorder. In each of these disorders, the gains that are achieved in treatment are maintained at follow-up and there is some indication that cognitive therapy may be more effective than pharmacotherapy in the longterm. Preliminary data suggest that cognitive therapy may also be effective in hypochondriasis.
A further experimental investigation of thought suppression.
It has often been suggested that attempts to suppress a thought will lead to an immediate and/or delayed increase in its occurrence. In a recent experiment (Clark, Ball & Pape, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 29, 253-257, 1991) we obtained a delayed (rebound) effect but failed to demonstrate an immediate enhancement effect. Lavey and van den Hout (Behavioural Psychotherapy, 18, 251-258, 1991) have suggested immediate enhancement might be observed only if subjects are instructed not to use distraction while suppressing. The present experiment tested this hypothesis. An immediate enhancement effect was not obtained but the delayed (rebound) effect was twice replicated and an artifactual explanation of this effect was discounted.
Cognitive mediation of panic attacks induced by biological challenge tests
A variety of pharmacological and physiological procedures reliably induce panic attacks in panic disorder patients but rarely do so in controls. Some biologically orientated researchers have described these procedures as biological challenge tests and have assumed that pharmacological and physiological manipulations have a direct panic-inducing effect and that individuals who are susceptible to these manipulations have a neurochemical disorder. An alternative explanation is provided by the cognitive theory of panic which proposes that the challenge tests induce panic because they produce bodily sensations that panic patients are prone to misinterpret and that it is the misinterpretation which is responsible for the induced attack. Experiments that have attempted to test the cognitive mediation account of biological challenge induced panic are reviewed. Overall, the results of these experiments provide strong support for the cognitive mediation hypothesis. In addition, it is suggested that the crucial cognitive variable is likely to be interpretation of challenge induced sensations, not expected affect or perceived control of the sensations. © 1993.
Cognitive processes in social phobia.
Social phobics, anxious controls and non-patient controls took part in a brief videotaped conversation with a stooge in order to investigate the cognitive model of social phobia. Thoughts, behaviour, and attention during the conversation were assessed. Compared to the control groups, social phobics had more negative self-evaluative thoughts, performed less well, and systematically underestimated their performance. There were no differences in attention between the three groups. Content analysis of thought sampling data from the conversation, and from three hypothetical situations, revealed that few of the negative thoughts reported by social phobics explicitly mentioned evaluation by other people. This suggests that social phobics may not closely monitor other people's responses in social situations and hence that their thoughts are not data driven. The results are discussed in relation to the cognitive model of social phobia and suggestions are made for improvements in the treatment of social phobia.