Communication skills in a population of primary school-aged children raised in an area of pronounced social disadvantage

Background: Previous studies have highlighted the level of communication difficulty experienced by children from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, but the pattern of difficulties remains unclear. Aims: The study asks whether the performance of a community sample of children from one of the most socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Scotland is best characterized by a general delay in all areas of development, by difficulties across the more formal structural aspects of language or in phonological skills. Methods & Procedures: The study included 138 monolingual English-speaking children: 63 (45.7%) boys and 75 (54.3%) girls aged between 5 and 12 years. All children were assessed blind to educational attainment in the school. Outcomes & Results: Nearly 40% of children had delayed language development with 10% having severe difficulties. The children presented with an uneven profile with much lower structural language scores than reading, general communication skills or non-verbal performance. Although service use was high in the group as a whole, the proportion who met criteria for specific language impairment on discrepancy criteria were not those who were being referred to speech and language therapy. Conclusions & Implications: Although many children were performing well within the normal range, a substantial proportion were not, having considerable implications for the way that services are delivered to these children. Given the high prevalence of delayed structural language difficulties in this group, there is a clear need for a more universal population-based approaches to service delivery.CIHR46pub229

Design and exploitation

of a high-performanc

A Comparative Study of the Programmability of a Signal Processing Application in an MIMD and an SIMD Multiprocessor

In this report, we address the issues of compilation and execution of a functional program, SISAL (Streams and Iterations in a Single Assignment Language), on the MP-1 TM SIMD (Single Instructionstream Multiple Data-stream) parallel machine. SISAL has been successful on many shared memory multiprocessors (SMM) as well as sequential machines. However, the compiler has not been available for distributed memory multiprocessors (MM) and SIMD machines. The original goal of the project presented in this report is to assess the programmability of signal processing applications on both SMM and SIMD machines. The application has been coded in SISAL and executed on both type of machines. In order to implement the SISAL code on the MP-1SIMD machine, we proposed the compilation schemes from SISAL code to MP-1's data-parallel C language (MPL). The experimental results proved that for a certain type of applications (such as signal processing applications presented in this report), a functional pro..

Chaotic zone in the Bogdanov-Takens bifurcation for diffeomorphisms

We consider a two-parametric analytic family of diffeomorphisms near the Bogdanov-Takens bifurcation. It is known that if the parameters belong to a homoclinic zone, the map has homoclinic points