Preliminary Validation of the CI-FRA Checklist: A Simple Screening Tool for Measuring the Early Signs of Reading and Spelling Disorders in Italian Primary Students

Although several screening tests for recognizing early signs of reading and spelling difficulties have been developed, brief and methodologically grounded tools for teachers are very limited. The present study aimed to lay the foundation for a new screening tool for teachers: the Checklist for early Indicators of risk Factors in Reading Ability (CI-FRA). The proposed checklist consists of 20 items, based on a 7-point Likert scale, and it investigates five domains: reading, writing, attention, and motor skills. Six hundred sixtyseven children were evaluated by 40 teachers during the first year of primary school and, longitudinally, in the second year. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were applied to verify structural validity. Concurrent validity was assessed by Spearman correlation to analyze the link between CI-FRA and reading and spelling standardized tests and cognitive tests. Reliability was assessed by Cronbach a and interclass correlation coefficient. The CFA reported a three-factor structure as the optimal solution, including language (reading and writing), visuospatial attention, and fine motor skills subscales. Good reliability, good internal consistency, and acceptable test\u2013 retest indices were found. Concurrent validity was confirmed by significant correlations between CI-FRA total score and standardized reading and spelling test, as well as by correlations between CI-FRA subscales and neuropsychological standardized test scores. Preliminary evaluation of sensitivity by receiver operating characteristic curves showed that the CI-FRA score has particularly high sensitivity and specificity for word reading speed deficit. In conclusion, the results confirm that CI-FRA is a theoretically grounded and statistically valid tool that could help the teachers to screen for early signs of reading and spelling difficulties

Historicizing the Emergence of Comics Art Scholarship in Spain, 1965-1975

This article traces the formation of comics art scholarship in Spain during the period 1965 to 1975. This decade witnessed the beginning of the study of comics as a serious object of cultural analysis. Reading formations surrounding the medium, in particular historical and critical reading protocols, as well as a set of key critical debates, were concurrent with the establishment and the development of mass communication studies as an incipient field of research in Spain in the mid-1960s. The aim of the article is to provide a close examination of the first generation of critics participating in and writing about the scene in relation to hitherto overlooked local and transnational contexts that shaped the constitution of the Spanish field of comics

An optimal algorithm for global termination detection in shared-memory asynchronous multiprocessor systems

In the literature, the problem of global termination detection in parallel systems is usually solved by message passing. In shared-memory systems, this problem can also be solved by using exclusively accessible variables with locking mechanisms. In this paper, we present an algorithm that solves the problem of global termination detection in shared-memory asynchronous multiprocessor systems without using locking. We assume a reasonable computation model in which concurrent reading does not require locking and concurrent writing different values without locking results in an arbitrary one of the values being actually written. For a system of n processors, the algorithm allocates a working space of 2n + 1 bits. The worst case time complexity of the algorithm is n + 2√n + 1, which we prove is the lower bound under a reasonable model of computation. © 1997 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Bounded Concurrent Timestamp Systems Using Vector Clocks

Shared registers are basic objects used as communication mediums in asynchronous concurrent computation. A concurrent timestamp system is a higher typed communication object, and has been shown to be a powerful tool to solve many concurrency control problems. It has turned out to be possible to construct such higher typed objects from primitive lower typed ones. The next step is to find efficient constructions. We propose a very efficient wait-free construction of bounded concurrent timestamp systems from 1-writer multireader registers. This finalizes, corrects, and extends, a preliminary bounded multiwriter construction proposed by the second author in 1986. That work partially initiated the current interest in wait-free concurrent objects, and introduced a notion of discrete vector clocks in distributed algorithms.Comment: LaTeX source, 35 pages; To apper in: J. Assoc. Comp. Mac

A longitudinal study of phonological processing skills and reading in bilingual children

French/English bilingual children (N=40) in French language schools participated in an 8-month longitudinal study of the relation between phonological processing skills and reading in French and English. Participants were administered measures of phonological awareness, working memory, naming speed, and reading in both languages. The results of the concurrent analyses show that phonological awareness skills in both French and English were uniquely predictive of reading performance in both languages after accounting for the influences of cognitive ability, reading ability, working memory, and naming speed. These findings support the hypothesis that phonological awareness is strongly related to beginning word reading skill in an alphabetic orthography. The results of the longitudinal analyses also suggest that orthographic depth influences phonological factors related to reading

Verification of Shared-Reading Synchronisers

Synchronisation classes are an important building block for shared memory concurrent programs. Thus to reason about such programs, it is important to be able to verify the implementation of these synchronisation classes, considering atomic operations as the synchronisation primitives on which the implementations are built. For synchronisation classes controlling exclusive access to a shared resource, such as locks, a technique has been proposed to reason about their behaviour. This paper proposes a technique to verify implementations of both exclusive access and shared-reading synchronisers. We use permission-based Separation Logic to describe the behaviour of the main atomic operations, and the basis for our technique is formed by a specification for class AtomicInteger, which is commonly used to implement synchronisation classes in java.util.concurrent. To demonstrate the applicability of our approach, we mechanically verify the implementation of various synchronisation classes like Semaphore, CountDownLatch and Lock.Comment: In Proceedings MeTRiD 2018, arXiv:1806.0933