Intonation development from five to thirteen

Research undertaken to date suggests that important developments in the understanding and use of intonation may take place after the age of 5;0. The present study aims to provide a more comprehensive account of these developments. A specially designed battery of prosodic tasks was administered to four groups of thirty children, from London (U.K.), with mean ages of 5;6, 8;7, 10;10 and 13;9. The tasks tap comprehension and production of functional aspects of intonation, in four communicative areas: CHUNKING (i.e. prosodic phrasing), AFFECT, INTERACTION and FOCUS. Results indicate that there is considerable variability among children within each age band on most tasks. The ability to produce intonation functionally is largely established in five-year-olds, though some specific functional contrasts are not mastered until C.A. 8;7. Aspects of intonation comprehension continue to develop up to C.A. 10;10, correlating with measures of expressive and receptive language development

Dyslexia Profiles Across Orthographies Differing in Transparency: An Evaluation of Theoretical Predictions Contrasting English and Greek

We examined the manifestation of dyslexia in a cross-linguistic study contrasting English and Greek children with dyslexia compared to chronological age and reading-level control groups on reading accuracy and fluency, phonological awareness, short-term memory, rapid naming, orthographic choice, and spelling. Materials were carefully matched across languages in item properties and structure. English children with dyslexia were more impaired on reading accuracy and phoneme deletion but not on reading fluency, memory, naming, or orthographic choice. No differences in impairment were observed between words and pseudowords across languages. Orthographic tests targeted specific morphemes to examine the accessibility of functionally distinct word parts across languages. There were no differences in prefix and stem orthographic choice, but English children were less successful in spelling inflectional suffixes despite greater morphological richness in Greek, highlighting the need for additional considerations beyond grain size in cross-linguistic work

Is there just one dyslexic reader? Evidence for the existence of distinct dyslexic sub-groups.

Purpose of Review. It is generally agreed that there are individual differences in the severity of the reading deficit in dyslexia. The purpose of this review is to discuss whether recent research strengthens claims that there are also qualitative differences in the type of reading impairment that individual dyslexic children experience. Recent Findings. Recent research suggests that surface dyslexia exists in larger numbers than has previously been assumed and that different subtypes of surface dyslexia exist in English as well as in Hebrew. Bilinguals with surface dyslexia in English also show the hallmarks of surface dyslexia when reading a more transparent orthography. The developmental reading impairments that have been observed in children with phonological dyslexia and in children with letter position dyslexia can also be found in several different orthographies and are quite distinct from those seen in surface dyslexia. Summary. Surface dyslexia, phonological dyslexia and letter position dyslexia represent qualitatively different types of developmental reading impairments and can all be seen in both opaque and more transparent alphabetic orthographies

Écologie : la crise de notre civilisation; retour aux archetypes

Version anglaise disponible dans la Bibliothèque numérique du CRDI: Facing serious ecological challenge

Facing serious ecological challenges

French version available in IDRC Digital Library: Ecologie : la crise de notre civilisation; retour aux archetype

Educational consequences of developmental speech disorder: Key Stage 1 National Curriculum assessment results in English and mathematics.

BACKGROUND: Children with speech difficulties may have associated educational problems. This paper reports a study examining the educational attainment of children at Key Stage 1 of the National Curriculum who had previously been identified with a speech difficulty. AIMS: (1) To examine the educational attainment at Key Stage 1 of children diagnosed with speech difficulties two/three years prior to the present study. (2) To compare the Key Stage 1 assessment results of children whose speech problems had resolved at the time of assessment with those whose problems persisted. SAMPLE(S): Data were available from 39 children who had an earlier diagnosis of speech difficulties at age 4/5 (from an original cohort of 47) at the age of 7. A control group of 35 children identified and matched at preschool on age, nonverbal ability and gender provided comparative data. METHODS: Results of Statutory Assessment Tests (SATs) in reading, reading comprehension, spelling, writing and maths, administered to children at the end of Year 2 of school were analysed. Performance across the two groups was compared. Performance was also compared to published statistics on national levels of attainment. RESULTS: Children with a history of speech difficulties performed less well than controls on reading, spelling and maths. However, children whose speech problems had resolved by the time of assessment performed no differently to controls. Children with persisting speech problems performed less well than controls on tests of literacy and maths. Spelling performance was a particular area of difficulty for children with persisting speech problems. CONCLUSIONS: Children with speech difficulties are likely to perform less well than expected on literacy and maths SAT's at age 7. Performance is related to whether the speech problem resolves early on and whether associated language problems exist. Whilst it is unclear whether poorer performance on maths is because of the language components of this task, the results indicate that speech problems, especially persisting ones, can affect the ability to access the National Curriculum to expected levels