A research team in Professor Leo Blomert’s lab at Maastricht University in the Netherlands reported that brain scans of children with and without dyslexia reveal differences when associating letters with sounds. Vera Blau and colleagues studied 34 9-½-year-old children, 18 of whom were identified as having dyslexia. While the children completed tasks under four different conditions (letters presented only visually; speech sounds presented alone; multi-sensory matching letter–sound pairs; and multi-sensory not-matching letter–sound pairs), the researchers obtained scans of brain activity. They found that in the brains of children with dyslexia there were weaker effects when letters and sounds matched than in the brains of children without dyslexia; these effects appeared most clearly in certain areas of the brain related to language function. In addition, the dyslexic readers’ brains showed weaker activation when speech sounds were the only stimulus (i.e., without accompanying letters).
Continue reading ‘Letter-sound correspondences: New scanning data’
Tag Archive for 'brain'
Professor John Gabrieli of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a paper in the current issue of Science discussing dyslexia. Here’s the abstract.
Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2009). Dyslexia: A new synergy between education and cognitive neuroscience. Science, 325, 280 – 283
Reading is essential in modern societies, but many children have dyslexia, a difficulty in learning to read. Dyslexia often arises from impaired phonological awareness, the auditory analysis of spoken language that relates the sounds of language to print. Behavioral remediation, especially at a young age, is effective for many, but not all, children. Neuroimaging in children with dyslexia has revealed reduced engagement of the left temporo-parietal cortex for phonological processing of print, altered white-matter connectivity, and functional plasticity associated with effective intervention. Behavioral and brain measures identify infants and young children at risk for dyslexia, and preventive intervention is often effective. A combination of evidence-based teaching practices and cognitive neuroscience measures could prevent dyslexia from occurring in the majority of children who would otherwise develop dyslexia.
Link to the article
Images from CMU Site
As Liz mentioned in a comment on the post RC > WR, Ann Meyler and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published a study documenting changes in children’s brain functioning following remedial reading instruction. In “Modifying the brain activation of poor readers during sentence comprehension with extended remedial instruction: A longitudinal study of neuroplasticity,” Professor Meyler and colleagues reported the results of conducting fMRI examinations of children while they performed sentence comprehension tasks at three different times: (i) prior to remedial reading instruction, (ii) following 100 hours of remedial reading instruction, and (iii) one year after remedial instruction had ended. The team found that the sample of students whom they imaged had clearly different patterns of activity in their brains following remediation and that the differences persisted one year after intervention ended.
Continue reading ‘Remediation affects brain functioning’
A team of researchers who study reading and neuropsychology has reported results from a study that show what parts of the brain are involved in sentence comprehension other than those used for recognizing the words in the sentences. In a study entitled “Functional MRI of Sentence Comprehension in Children with Dyslexia: Beyond Word Recognition” that will appear soon in Cerebral Cortex, S. L. Rimrodt and colleagues (including Ken Pugh and Laurie Cutting, whom I know) compared the fMRI data from groups of children with and without dyslexia on tasks involving word reading and sentence comprehension. They found that the children with dyslexia had disproportional activation of areas of the brain usually employed in processing linguistic information, attending, and selecting responses.
Continue reading ‘RC > WR’
Last week, Liz Ditz teased us with notices about her whereabouts: She was attending an annual conference about brain research and learning. Don’t think I’ve flipped a wig; she wasn’t hearing the pablum that we usually get on this topic. This is a scholarly event, with presentations by eminent authorities (Is that redundant? Nope.) who are invited to discuss their work. I wrote to Liz that I envied her opportunity to attend.
Liz posted these entries: What I Am Doing This Week: Learning and the Brain Conference and Cognitive Neuroscience and Education: A Ways to Go. Go read them and then monitor her site for updates from her conference adventures. I shall do so, and mayhaps she’ll send LD Blog a heads up when there are going to be new entries!
LD and chiropracty–NOT
Chiropractors are likely to complain about the treatment that their methods receive in posts on this blog. I’ve posted recently that I find wanting the bases for the the (currently-on-tour, see-’em-in-your-neighborhood-soon) Brain Balance Music program. This post will be even more alarming to supporters of those sorts of treatments for LD.
The fundamental problem with the therapies for Learning Disabilities recommended by some chiropractors is that those therapies are bogus. They may be advocated by people who honestly believe that they’re recommending helpful stuff. The hypothetical relations among the neurological and behavioral factors may sound sensible, but that is, in large part, because we’re listening to the words rather than the facts. The folks may have seen what they believe are legitimate improvements in children’s academic and social behavior after the children received the therapy. Parents may have told them how much better the children seem.
None of that counts as scientific (i.e., objective, generalizable, refutable) evidence of benefits. The advocates may be as seriously misled as they mislead their potential clients. They just don’t have the data. Their explanations are post hoc and untested, at best.
In addition to the probably benign Brain Balance Music methods, consider one of the other chiropractic therapies: Cranio-sacral therapy: The hypothesis is that something about the connection between the child’s head and tail causes learning problems (even mental retardation and autism!) and it can be corrected by chiropractic manipulations.
Continue reading ‘LD and chiropracty–NOT’