Vocabulary is important for some, but not all reading skills

Although there is evidence for a close link between the development of oral vocabulary and reading comprehension, less clear is whether oral vocabulary skills relate to the development of word-level reading skills. This study investigated vocabulary and literacy in 81 children of 8-10 years. In regression analyses, vocabulary accounted for unique variance in exception word reading and reading comprehension, but not text reading accuracy, decoding and regular word reading. Consistent with these data, children with poor reading comprehension exhibited oral vocabulary weaknesses and read fewer exception words correctly. These findings demonstrate that oral vocabulary is associated with some, but not all reading skills. Results are discussed in terms of current models of reading development

Cost-benefit analysis of the Teaching Excellence Framework

As the Higher Education and Research Bill gets its second reading in the House of Commons, Dorothy Bishop revisits the costs and benefits of one of its primary components, the Teaching Excellence Framework. Based on the government’s own analysis, the system is designed to separate winners and losers with potentially devastating effects for the losers. The outcome will depend crucially on two factors: the rate of inflation and the rate of increase in students. If either growth in student numbers or inflation is lower, then the difference between those who do and don’t get good TEF ratings (and hence the apparent financial benefits of TEF) will decline

A Reader's Advisory Page and How it Grew

“Why don’t we create a Reader’s Advisory page?” asked my co-worker, Mary. Our Library system (The Lake County Public Library, Indiana) had just posted its own Web page. Previously, Mary and I had taken an HTML class and we thought that together we could handle it. After all, we had been running theme-based Reader’s Advisory Displays for several years. How hard could it be to create a theme-based page every month to complement our display? Hah, were we naïve

Sex chromosome trisomies are not associated with atypical lateralization for language

Aim: To test the hypothesis that sex chromosome trisomies (SCTs) are associated with reduced left lateralization for language. Method: Using a cross‐sectional design, language laterality was measured during an animation description task using functional transcranial Doppler ultrasonography. Data were available for 75 children with an SCT (47,XXX females [n=26], 47,XXY males [n=25], 47,XYY males [n=24]; mean age 11y 4mo [SD 3y 10mo]) and 132 comparison children with typical karyotypes (69 males, 63 females; mean age 9y 1mo [SD 1y 7mo]). Results: Lateralization for language did not differ between the SCT and comparison groups, either in mean laterality index or relative frequency of each laterality category. There were no differences when splitting the group with an SCT by trisomy. Handedness showed no group effects. Interpretation: Our data provide no evidence for disrupted lateralization for language in SCTs. The brain basis of the cognitive phenotype in SCTs is unlikely to be a failure of the left hemisphere to specialize for language, as previously suggested. What this paper adds: Children with a sex chromosome trisomy (SCT) have typically lateralized language. This disproves theories linking language problems to hemispheric specialization in SCTs

What Causes Specific Language Impairment in Children?

Specific language impairment (SLI) is diagnosed when a child's language development is deficient for no obvious reason. For many years, there was a tendency to assume that SLI was caused by factors such as poor parenting, subtle brain damage around the time of birth, or transient hearing loss. Subsequently it became clear that these factors were far less important than genes in determining risk for SLI. A quest to find “the gene for SLI” was undertaken, but it soon became apparent that no single cause could account for all cases. Furthermore, although fascinating cases of SLI caused by a single mutation have been discovered, in most children the disorder has a more complex basis, with several genetic and environmental risk factors interacting. The clearest evidence for genetic effects has come from studies that diagnosed SLI using theoretically motivated measures of underlying cognitive deficits rather than conventional clinical criteria

Investigating orthographic and semantic aspects of word learning in poor comprehenders

This study compared orthographic and semantic aspects of word learning in children who differed in reading comprehension skill. Poor comprehenders and controls matched for age (9-10 years), nonverbal ability and decoding skill were trained to pronounce 20 visually presented nonwords, 10 in a consistent way and 10 in an inconsistent way. They then had an opportunity to infer the meanings of the new words from story context. Orthographic learning was measured in three ways: the number of trials taken to learn to pronounce nonwords correctly, orthographic choice and spelling. Across all measures, consistent items were easier than inconsistent items and poor comprehenders did not differ from control children. Semantic learning was assessed on three occasions, using a nonword-picture matching task. While poor comprehenders showed equivalent semantic learning to controls immediately after exposure to nonword meaning, this knowledge was not well-retained over time. Results are discussed in terms of the language and reading skills of poor comprehenders and in relation to current models of reading development

Reply to Bowman et al: Building the foundations for moving mu suppression research forward

This article forms a reply to a comment on our original manuscript "Mu suppression - a good measure of the human mirror neuron system?

A Reaching Test Reveals Weak Hand Preference in Specific Language Impairment and Developmental Co-ordination Disorder

A reaching test for quantifying hand preference (QHP task) was given to 7- to 11-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) or developmental coordination disorder (DCD). The performance of these clinical children was compared to both an age-matched and younger control group. The four groups did not differ in terms of preferred writing hand or preference on a handedness questionnaire. The QHP measure discriminated the clinical and younger control groups from the age-matched controls, but not from each other. Right-handed children with SLI, DCD, and the younger controls reached predominantly with the right hand to spatial positions located to the right of their body’ s midline and with the left hand to positions situated to its left. Right-handers in the age-matched control group showed a significantly greater tendency to use their right hand to reach to all spatial positions. The increased tendency of the children with SLI to use the non-preferred hand was particularly striking because it was seen both in those with and without recognised motor difficulties. The QHP task appears to be a sensitive, but non-specific, indicator of developmental disorders

Aminoacyl tRNA synthetases as malarial drug targets: a comparative bioinformatics study

Treatment of parasitic diseases has been challenging due to evolution of drug resistant parasites, and thus there is need to identify new class of drugs and drug targets. Protein translation is important for survival of malarial parasite, Plasmodium, and the pathway is present in all of its life cycle stages. Aminoacyl tRNA synthetases are primary enzymes in protein translation as they catalyse amino acid addition to the cognate tRNA. This study sought to understand differences between Plasmodium and human aminoacyl tRNA synthetases through bioinformatics analysis

Is auditory discrimination mature by middle childhood? A study using time-frequency analysis of mismatch responses from 7 years to adulthood

Behavioural and electrophysiological studies give differing impressions of when auditory discrimination is mature. Ability to discriminate frequency and speech contrasts reaches adult levels only around 12 years of age, yet an electrophysiological index of auditory discrimination, the mismatch negativity (MMN), is reported to be as large in children as in adults. Auditory ERPs were measured in 30 children (7 to 12 years), 23 teenagers (13 to 16 years) and 32 adults (35 to 56 years) in an oddball paradigm with tone or syllable stimuli. For each stimulus type, a standard stimulus (1000 Hz tone or syllable [ba]) occurred on 70% of trials, and one of two deviants (1030 or 1200 Hz tone, or syllables [da] or [bi]) equiprobably on the remaining trials. For the traditional MMN interval of 100–250 ms post-onset, size of mismatch responses increased with age, whereas the opposite trend was seen for an interval from 300 to 550 ms post-onset, corresponding to the late discriminative negativity (LDN). Time-frequency analysis of single trials revealed that the MMN resulted from phase-synchronization of oscillations in the theta (4–7 Hz) range, with greater synchronization in adults than children. Furthermore, the amount of synchronization was significantly correlated with frequency discrimination threshold. These results show that neurophysiological processes underlying auditory discrimination continue to develop through childhood and adolescence. Previous reports of adult-like MMN amplitudes in children may be artefactual results of using peak measurements when comparing groups that differ in variance