Speech perception abilities of adults with dyslexia: is there any evidence for a true deficit?

PURPOSE: This study investigated whether adults with dyslexia show evidence of a consistent speech perception deficit by testing phoneme categorization and word perception in noise. METHOD: Seventeen adults with dyslexia and 20 average readers underwent a test battery including standardized reading, language and phonological awareness tests, and tests of speech perception. Categorization of a pea/bee voicing contrast was evaluated using adaptive identification and discrimination tasks, presented in quiet and in noise, and a fixed-step discrimination task. Two further tests of word perception in noise were presented. RESULTS: There were no significant group differences for categorization in quiet or noise, across- and within-category discrimination as measured adaptively, or word perception, but average readers showed better across- and within-category discrimination in the fixed-step discrimination task. Individuals did not show consistent poor performance across related tasks. CONCLUSIONS: The small number of group differences, and lack of consistent poor individual performance, suggests weak support for a speech perception deficit in dyslexia. It seems likely that at least some poor performances are attributable to nonsensory factors like attention. It may also be that some individuals with dyslexia have speech perceptual acuity that is at the lower end of the normal range and exacerbated by nonsensory factors

Preliminary study of haplotypes linked to the rare cystic fibrosis E1104X mutation

The analysis of some extra- and intragenic markers within or closely linked to the cystic fibrosis transmembrane regulator (CFTR) gene is useful as a molecular method in clinical linkage analysis. Indeed, knowing that the molecular basis of cystic fibrosis (CF) is highly heterogeneous in our population, the study of haplotype association with normal and CF chromosomes could be very helpful in cases where one or both mutations remain unidentified. In this study, we analysed with PCR-RFLP and capillary electrophoresis some extra (pJ3.11, KM19 and XV2C) and intragenic (IVS8CA, IVS17bTA and IVS17bCA) polymorphic markers in 50 normal and 10 Tunisian patients carrying the rare E1104X mutation in order to determine the haplotype associated with this mutation. For the extragenic markers, 8 haplotypes were identified. The most frequent of them are the 221 and 112 accounting for 80% of total haplotypes. For the intragenic markers, five haplotypes were present on the E1104X chromosomes. One of them 16-31-13 accounted for 50%. To our knowledge, this is the first work to be interested to the haplotypes linked to the E1104X mutation. This preliminary study of haplotypes could be a helpful method to determine the molecular lesions responsible of this pathology

Building an XML document warehouse

International audienceData Warehouses and OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) technologies are dedicated to analyzing structured data issued from organizations' OLTP (On Line Transaction Processing) systems. Furthermore, in order to enhance their decision support systems, these organizations need to explore XML (eXtensible Markup Language) documents as an additional and important source of unstructured data. In this context, this paper addresses the warehousing of document-centric XML documents. More specifically, we propose a two-method approach to build Document Warehouse conceptual schemas. The first method is for the unification of XML document structures; it aims to elaborate a global and generic view for a set of XML documents belonging to the same domain. The second method is for designing multidimensional galaxy schemas for Document Warehouses

SERVICEABILITY BEHAVIOR OF NORMAL AND HIGH-STRENGTH REINFORCED CONCRETE T-BEAMS

Serviceability behavior of Normal Strength Concrete (NSC) and High Strength Concrete (HSC) T-beams was experimentally evaluated. The crack pattern was observed, the effect of flange dimensions (breadth and thickness) on the crack pattern and load-deflection response was evaluated experimentally for 10 beams comprising the two studied groups, NSC and HSC T-beams. The short-term deflections were measured experimentally and predicted empirically under mid-span concentrated loading. It was found that increasing the flange width and thickness resulted in higher loads and lower deflections under service loads to a different extent. Prior to failure, the increment in the maximum loads was up to 22% while the deflection reduced by 31% for NSC and 23% for HSC beams. The available equations for determining the effective moment of inertia (Ie) were reviewed and used in predicting the Ie of the cracked beam. The results were compared with the experimental values (Iexp). The Ie showed a noticeable difference, especially for the HSC T-beams. New equations were proposed in which the tensile reinforcement ratio was considered. Compared with the other available equations, the proposed equations demonstrated a better agreement and repeatability of predicting experimental results studied herein. In addition, the proposed equations were used to predict the Ie for experimentally tested T-beams available in the literature. The proposed models showed a high degree of accuracy

Intérêt de la technique de Koyanagi dans le traitement de l’hypospadias posterieurchez l’enfant

No Abstrac

Finite and infinite-dimensional symmetries of pure N=2 supergravity in D=4

We study the symmetries of pure N=2 supergravity in D=4. As is known, this theory reduced on one Killing vector is characterised by a non-linearly realised symmetry SU(2,1) which is a non-split real form of SL(3,C). We consider the BPS brane solutions of the theory preserving half of the supersymmetry and the action of SU(2,1) on them. Furthermore we provide evidence that the theory exhibits an underlying algebraic structure described by the Lorentzian Kac-Moody group SU(2,1)^{+++}. This evidence arises both from the correspondence between the bosonic space-time fields of N=2 supergravity in D=4 and a one-parameter sigma-model based on the hyperbolic group SU(2,1)^{++}, as well as from the fact that the structure of BPS brane solutions is neatly encoded in SU(2,1)^{+++}. As a nice by-product of our analysis, we obtain a regular embedding of the Kac-Moody algebra su(2,1)^{+++} in e_{11} based on brane physics.Comment: 70 pages, final version published in JHE