A comparison of sighted and visually impaired children’s text comprehension

Aim: Do children with visual impairments outperform their sighted cohorts in reading and auditory comprehension tasks? Methods: We address this question by applying panel regression techniques on a comprehensive sample of 16 children with visual impairments from a Greek special school for students with visual impairments. Results: By comparing the reader comprehender profile for both children types, we find that the children with visual impairments perform better than their sighted counterparts. The better performance is supported both unconditionally and conditionally on idiosyncratic characteristics, such as age, text complexity, modality, sex and reading ability. Conclusion: Decomposing the reader comprehender profile into a literal, global and local type of questions we find that the results are mainly driven by the superior performance of the children with VI in the literal questions

Properties of low-lying intruder states in 34Al and 34Si populated in the beta-decay of 34Mg

The results of the IS530 experiment at ISOLDE revealed new information concerning several nuclei close to the N ≈ 20 'Island of Inversion' - 34Mg, 34Al, 34Si. The half-life of 34Mgwas found to be three times larger than the adopted value (63(1) ms instead of 20(10) ms). The beta-gamma spectroscopy of 34Mgperformed for the first time in this experiment, led to the first experimental level scheme for 34Al, also showing that the full beta strength goes through the predicted 1+ isomer in 34Al[1] and/or excited states that deexcite to it. The subsequent beta-decay of the 1+ isomer in 34Alallowed the observation of new gamma lines in 34Si, (tentatively) associated with low-spin high-energy excited states previously unobserved