Reading Aloud and First Language Development: A Systematic Review

Reading aloud appears to be an important lever for improving language acquisition and development in early childhood, and later in life it strengthens many sub-dimensions of language. However, the availability of numerous variations on reading training, shaped by different methodologies and different lengths of exposure make it difficult to determine the best approaches to follow. The aim of this review is to identify the available literature contributions that examine the association between mediated reading training, first language development and the acquisition of new vocabulary, including other components that could be improved by these interventions, such as cognitive function, emergent literacy and adult-child verbal interactions. The purpose is to compare research highlighting their fundamental characteristics, tools, duration and methodologies used in order to point out the effects that the practice of reading aloud produces on the acquisition and the enhancement of language, particularly in the age of language development. The analysis of the 51 articles included aims to identify the most effective reading strategies in terms of practices, timing and methods, able to produce the most significant gains in the language area

The Association Between Reading and Emotional Development: A Systematic Review

Reading practice is associated with numerous psychological benefits. However, its influence over individual emotional dimensions has generally been underestimated by research. Only recently has it been recognized across different developmental stages but evidence is still scarce. The aim of this systematic review is to shed light over the association between reading and the several (and sometimes hardly distinguishable) socio-emotional constructs that we have identified in literature: interpersonal skills and prosocial behavior; emotional and behavioral symptoms; emotional regulation and expression; empathy and theory of mind; emotional knowledge and comprehension; and emotional responses. A total of 50 studies were analyzed, including all age groups, various settings, research drawings, and different emotional constructs in order to create a comprehensive view of the association between reading and emotions. Results show that overall reading practice has a positive impact on socio-emotional development, whatever its declination, regardless of age, gender or setting of implementation

Uguali e diversi: un’indagine comparativa tra generazioni sulle attese e le percezioni relative alla genitorialità

This paper, following an analysis of the literature and taking some key concepts related to parenting, highlights the possible transmissive relationships on perception related to parenting style, through a qualitative research conducted in the Umbrian territories and Tuscany. The intent was to access, through semi-structured interview, to the prospect of the subject, accepting his point of view, his interpretations of the theme and perceptions regarding personal experience. The aim was to see if and how the perception of the “aggregate” parental style adopted by their primary caregivers, influence the reflection and perception level of the educational model that is adopted (in the case of couples already with children) or that is intended to take (in the case of those surveyed whom are not yet parents), towards their children. The research was aimed to highlight any differences arising in connection with such perception among those who already play the parental role and those not yet parents. Thus, is there a perception of intergenerational transmission of educational styles? How these perceptions influence the practices? The style of education experienced as children, will influence or is influencing the way of being a parent and the choice of parenting style

SemEHR:A general-purpose semantic search system to surface semantic data from clinical notes for tailored care, trial recruitment, and clinical research

OBJECTIVE: Unlocking the data contained within both structured and unstructured components of electronic health records (EHRs) has the potential to provide a step change in data available for secondary research use, generation of actionable medical insights, hospital management, and trial recruitment. To achieve this, we implemented SemEHR, an open source semantic search and analytics tool for EHRs. METHODS: SemEHR implements a generic information extraction (IE) and retrieval infrastructure by identifying contextualized mentions of a wide range of biomedical concepts within EHRs. Natural language processing annotations are further assembled at the patient level and extended with EHR-specific knowledge to generate a timeline for each patient. The semantic data are serviced via ontology-based search and analytics interfaces. RESULTS: SemEHR has been deployed at a number of UK hospitals, including the Clinical Record Interactive Search, an anonymized replica of the EHR of the UK South London and Maudsley National Health Service Foundation Trust, one of Europe's largest providers of mental health services. In 2 Clinical Record Interactive Search-based studies, SemEHR achieved 93% (hepatitis C) and 99% (HIV) F-measure results in identifying true positive patients. At King's College Hospital in London, as part of the CogStack program (github.com/cogstack), SemEHR is being used to recruit patients into the UK Department of Health 100 000 Genomes Project (genomicsengland.co.uk). The validation study suggests that the tool can validate previously recruited cases and is very fast at searching phenotypes; time for recruitment criteria checking was reduced from days to minutes. Validated on open intensive care EHR data, Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III, the vital signs extracted by SemEHR can achieve around 97% accuracy. CONCLUSION: Results from the multiple case studies demonstrate SemEHR's efficiency: weeks or months of work can be done within hours or minutes in some cases. SemEHR provides a more comprehensive view of patients, bringing in more and unexpected insight compared to study-oriented bespoke IE systems. SemEHR is open source, available at https://github.com/CogStack/SemEHR

Association Rule Mining for Risk Assessment in Epidemiology

In epidemiology, a risk assessment measures the association between exposures and a health outcome. Risk characterization has traditionally been performed using statistical methods such as logistic regression, but such methods are not effective when working with highly correlated variables and when trying to assess synergic actions between exposures. These limitations become evident in studies related to asthma, a common chronic that affects 25 million people in the US. The prevalence of asthma is growing and research is struggling to find the reason. Many factors have been associated with causing and triggering asthma, but their interactions, as well as which one is the most responsible for the spreading of asthma, are still unclear. Outdoor air pollution is on the list of possible causes and triggers. Characterizing the connection between asthma and air pollution is not an easy task, because of high collinearity between pollutant agents, possible synergic actions, and difficulty in controlling the exposure. The research community is currently encouraging the use of multi-pollutant models to yield better results. In this dissertation we propose: (i) a modified Apriori association rule mining method for identification of connections between exposures and risk variations, and (ii) a novel genetic algorithm (GA) designed to mine risk-based quantitative association rules. Both methods were tested on a group of synthetic datasets, and on real data collection about pediatric asthma cases and pollution levels in Houston. The results on the synthetic datasets show the advantages of applying our methods to augment traditional logistic regression, and help determining the best metrics to include in the GA fitness function (odds ratio, length, repetition and redundancy). Tests on clinical data suggest the existence of a correlation between asthma and outdoor air pollutants, both alone and as a mixture. The genetic algorithm improves the results of the Apriori-based method by recognizing what appear to be the most dangerous levels of exposure. Future work will help to improve aspects of the GA such as population initialization or rule selection. To date, the proposed methods represent a significant step in the direction of risk assessment based on association rule mining in epidemiological studies.Computer Science, Department o

Cosa rende la lettura ad alta voce una pratica di qualità? La testimonianza di insegnanti eccellenti

There are numerous studies in the literature documenting the effectiveness of reading aloud in the cognitive, linguistic and emotional development of children from a very early age. Reading in fact emerges as a fundamental tool for the development of literacy, comprehension skills, reading and wri-ting, competences that are of extreme relevance within the individual school career. The mediation of reading aloud also enables young children to approach stories at an early age, thus training their comprehension skills, accessing texts at a higher linguistic level than those they could access through independent reading, and being able to listen to texts that are more interesting and engaging for them. For these and many other aspects, the practice of reading aloud is at the centre of current studies, as it represents a fundamental intervention in the promotion of an individual's overall educational success, and for this reason, school contexts are configured as fundamental learning environments for all. Ho-wever, as much as reading aloud plays a relevant role in the development of the aforementioned compe-tences, less evident is the 'how' to achieve these results, in which way this practice can best be applied. This work stems from these considerations and pursues the objective of identifying the attentions held and actions carried out by teachers during reading aloud. Starting from the data acquired in the logbooks and the categorised evidence from 22 semi-structured interviews, in which the experiences related to the practice of reading aloud by primary and secondary school teachers were collected, the aim is to understand the aspects that make the practice of reading aloud of better quality.There are numerous studies in the literature documenting the effectiveness of reading aloud in the cognitive, linguistic and emotional development of children from a very early age. Reading in fact emerges as a fundamental tool for the development of literacy, comprehension skills, reading and wri-ting, competences that are of extreme relevance within the individual school career. The mediation of reading aloud also enables young children to approach stories at an early age, thus training their comprehension skills, accessing texts at a higher linguistic level than those they could access through independent reading, and being able to listen to texts that are more interesting and engaging for them. For these and many other aspects, the practice of reading aloud is at the centre of current studies, as it represents a fundamental intervention in the promotion of an individual's overall educational success, and for this reason, school contexts are configured as fundamental learning environments for all. Ho-wever, as much as reading aloud plays a relevant role in the development of the aforementioned compe-tences, less evident is the 'how' to achieve these results, in which way this practice can best be applied. This work stems from these considerations and pursues the objective of identifying the attentions held and actions carried out by teachers during reading aloud. Starting from the data acquired in the logbooks and the categorised evidence from 22 semi-structured interviews, in which the experiences related to the practice of reading aloud by primary and secondary school teachers were collected, the aim is to understand the aspects that make the practice of reading aloud of better quality

Effetti di lettura

Dovendo individuare un elemento riassuntivo, con i dati di cui disponiamo oggi, è possibile stabilire, senza forzature, una stretta correlazione tra lettura dei libri e incremento della qualità della vita e del benessere complessivo della persona e delle comunità. Nelle aree (o nelle persone) presso le quali la lettura dei libri è maggiormente praticata è più diffusa anche la lettura di giornali, si va più spesso al cinema o a teatro, si ascolta più musica, si frequentano di più i musei. In tali condizioni si riscontra un tasso di reddito più elevato, una società più coesa, maggiori capacità di innovazione e sviluppo, un incremento di attenzione alla legalità, una diminuzione della criminalità, della corruzione nonché della discriminazione nei confronti delle donne. I benefici apportati dalla lettura sono diversi e numerosi: la lettura è un “antidoto” alla manipolazione narrativa altrui (della pubblicità, della politica) è una difesa dal “pensiero unico” (che costituisce il “seme” del pregiudizio), è uno strumento di costruzione e ricostruzione del Sé, e della propria vita, incrementa le competenze utili alla gestione del proprio futuro, potenzia le capacità di comprensione di se stessi e degli altri, rinforza la capacità di immaginazione. La lettura viene solitamente incontrata nella primissima infanzia, nella relazione di cura e di prossimità (anche fisica) con un adulto significativo ed è dunque un’esperienza strettamente correlata con la motivazione e le competenze in questo campo delle figure genitoriali. Le prime esperienze “pubbliche” sono quelle vissute nella scuola dell’infanzia dove rivestono un ruolo fondamentale in quanto possono contribuire a moderare l’effetto di vantaggio o svantaggio costituito dalle differenti provenienze familiari: “offrire opportunità di lettura e racconto, nei primissimi percorsi di istruzione e cura, significa esercitare un’azione di democrazia, non farlo significa essere coscienti che si perpetueranno degli svantaggi” (Batini, 2011, pp. 20-21). Alcune ricerche mostrano come la quantità di tempo dedicata alla lettura nel contesto scolastico accresca il rendimento relativamente alle capacità di lettura e all’acquisizione di nuovi vocaboli (Anderson, Wilson & Fieding, 1988; Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998)

Gli effetti della lettura di narrativa nell’infanzia: un mezzo per potenziare lo sviluppo di abilità cognitive e psicologiche

La lettura ad alta voce può rappresentare una didattica fondamentale per lo sviluppo di molte facoltà cognitive, emotive e psicologiche, già nella primissima infanzia. In questo contributo, si mostra come pratiche di lettura intensiva ad alta voce possano incrementare questi benefici all’interno della scuola dell’infanzia. I risultati mo- strano un incremento delle prestazioni nei gruppi sperimentali rispetto ai gruppi di controllo, suggerendo che tali pratiche, se strutturate e standardizzate, possono ri- sultare efficienti per il potenziamento dello sviluppo cognitivo dei bambini.Reading aloud can be a fundamental educational tool for the enhancement of many cognitive, emotional, psychological faculties in the earliest childhood. In this contribution, we show how intensive reading practices aloud, can increase these benefits with child especially between 3 and 6 years. Those results show improved performance in experimental groups compared to control groups, suggesting that such practice, if structured and standardized, can be efficient for a correct strengthening of children’s cognitive developmen

Neuropsychological benefits of a narrative cognitive training program for people living with dementia: A pilot study

Many areas in the cortex are active during reading of narrative material, and these activations in the brain produce significant changes in connectivity. Following previous results showing cognitive benefits in memory domains of a narrative training program in nursing home patients living with dementia, the aim of the present study was to perform a more in depth investigation of the effects of this training on memory domains and other cognitive areas. METHODS: An experimental group of eight patients underwent auditory narrative training of 60 hours. At the beginning and end of the training, subjects were tested with a neuropsychological battery to quantify any improvements in individual performance. RESULTS: The results showed a statistically significant improvement in the list learning task (immediate memory) and list learning recognition for single tasks, and a statistically significant improvement in overall cognitive area scores for immediate and delayed memory. CONCLUSION: Results replicate and expand our previous findings, indicating that this type of intervention can increase performance on memory-related test