Heritable risk factors associated with language impairments

There is a strong genetic contribution to children’s language and literacy impairments. The aim of this study was to determine which aspects of the phenotype are familial by comparing 34 parents of probands with language/literacy impairments and 33 parents of typically developing probands. The parents responded to questionnaires regarding previous history for language/reading impairment and participated in psychometric testing. The psychometric test battery consisted of tests assessing non-verbal IQ, short-term memory, articulation, receptive grammar, reading abilities and spelling. Self-report measures demonstrated a higher prevalence of language and literacy impairments in parents of affected probands (32%) compared with parents of unaffected probands (6%). The two groups of parents differed significantly in their performance on the non-word repetition, oromotor and digit span tasks. Non-word repetition gave the best discrimination between the parent groups even when the data from the parents who actually were impaired as ascertained by direct testing or self-report were removed from the analyses. This suggests that non-word repetition serves as a marker of a family risk for language impairment. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues associated with ascertainment of specific language impairment (SLI)

Global Ambition and Human Resource Reorientation of Indian and Malaysian Managers: Some Indicative Empirical Evidence

Transforming managerial competencies and mindsets is one of the most significant challenges facing contemporary Indian and Malaysian economies. This article provides empirical evidence demonstrating how managers in India and Malaysia are navigating the challenge of acquiring talented personnel to better facilitate central business activities in contemporary economic and cultural contexts. A salient theme of the article is that Indian and Malaysian managers are pursuing notions of human capital accumulation within a premise that the better deployment of resources is linked to an improvement in management systems and practices. The article posits that companies in the South East Asian landscapes are focusing on designing better selection and recruitment strategies to engage in continuous and innovative reform to cope with the demanding pressures of globalization