Defining dyslexia as a developmental language disorder

Despite recent developments in research and theory, investigators and practitioners continue to rely on rather traditional definitions of dyslexia. This paper discusses some of the problems with traditional definitions and reviews a rapidly growing body of research that suggests a more comprehensive definition. According to this definition, dyslexia is a developmental language disorder that involves a deficit(s) in phonological processing. This disorder manifests itself in various phonological difficulties as well as a specific reading disability.     

The neural basis of developmental dyslexia

Until recently, many thought developmental dyslexia was a behavioral disorder that primarily affected reading. In fact, it is a partly heritable condition, the clinical manifestations of which are extremely complex including deficits in reading, working memory, sensorimotor coordination, and early sensory processing. Even though extensive research has characterized these behavioral abnormalities carefully, the biological mechanisms of the clinical manifestations still are poorly understood. Recent research into both the nature of the structural and functional abnormalities in developmental dyslexia and the functional neuroanatomy of reading have rapidly advanced our understanding of the localization of the processes responsible for the signs and symptoms of dyslexia. This paper reviews recent evidence supporting a biological basis for developmental dyslexia. This article was made possible by grant NICHD HD36461 from The Charles A. Dana Foundation and The International Dyslexia Association.     

Subtypes of developmental dyslexia: The influence of definitional variables

The purpose of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that the manner in which a reading disability is defined will influence the conclusions that are made about the characteristics of the disability. To test this hypothesis, learning disabled and normally achieving children, aged 6 to 14, were administered tasks measuring grammatical, shortterm memory, phonological, reading, and visual-spatial skills. The poor readers were divided into groups of poor readers with

When professors confront themselves: Towards a theoretical conceptualization of video self-confrontation in higher education

The use of video self-confrontation (VSC) Throughout the paper, the abbreviation VSC will be used for video self-confrontation. as a method to reinforce desired behaviors or induce changes in human behavior, has been increasing in recent years. The major reviewers of the literature on VSC in the last three decades point out that there is relatively little qualitative and quantitative research which explores the underlying processes of VSC and its theoretical conceptualization. Moreover, there is still a need to prove many of the claims advanced by practitioners about the effectiveness of VSC. This article reviews two of the theoretical conceptualizations and tentative explanations of the VSC process. The first is based on affect, such as self-confrontation, dissonance, anxiety, stress, distress and eustress. The second explanation is based on a cognitive and information-processing approach and includes: feedback, self-concept, self-efficacy and attribution theories. The article describes an emerging integrated conceptualization which may provide better insight into the process which should be the focus of further studies. The main purpose of VSC in higher education is to improve teaching-learning processes. Faculty's commitment to this purpose is determined by many factors, such as: their perception and attitudes towards the research/teaching dichotomy and the university's reward system; their motivation and concepts of self-efficacy and self-fulfillment; and their attribution mechanisms of success or failure in teaching. All these factors greatly influence their readiness to be motivated in VSC processes and the effectiveness of their VSC uses. VSC is a powerful technique which has a great potential in facilitating behavioral changes. It can cause harm or be wasted if not used properly. Suggestions for optimal uses are presented.     

Cerebral dominance and subtypes of developmental dyslexia

Conclusions Evidence of different syndromes of developmental dyslexia raises the question of the interaction between dyslexic types and patterns of cerebral dominance. Some of the proposed classifications of dyslexia, and most notably the one proposed by Boder (1971), strongly suggest that dyslexic subtypes, that can be identified clinically by reading-spelling patterns, may possess different or opposite cerebral dominance patterns. Thus, research of cerebral dominance in dyslexia (i.e., Orton’s hypothesis) should involve careful selection and classification of subjects. When this is done it can be shown that electrophysiological measures can identify cerebral-dominance abnormalities in at least one subtype of developmental dyslexia. This paper was presented in part at the 29th Annual Conference of The Orton Society, November 1978, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.     

Towards identifying dyslexia in Standard Indonesian: the development of a reading assessment battery

With its transparent orthography, Standard Indonesian is spoken by over 160 million inhabitants and is the primary language of instruction in education and the government in Indonesia. An assessment battery of reading and reading-related skills was developed as a starting point for the diagnosis of dyslexia in beginner learners. Founded on the International Dyslexia Association’s definition of dyslexia, the test battery comprises nine empirically motivated reading and reading-related tasks assessing word reading, pseudoword reading, arithmetic, rapid automatized naming, phoneme deletion, forward and backward digit span, verbal fluency, orthographic choice (spelling), and writing. The test was validated by computing the relationships between the outcomes on the reading-skills and reading-related measures by means of correlation and factor analyses. External variables, i.e., school grades and teacher ratings of the reading and learning abilities of individual students, were also utilized to provide evidence of its construct validity. Four variables were found to be significantly related with reading-skill measures: phonological awareness, rapid naming, spelling, and digit span. The current study on reading development in Standard Indonesian confirms findings from other languages with transparent orthographies and suggests a test battery including preliminary norm scores for screening and assessment of elementary school children learning to read Standard Indonesian.     

Continuities between speech and spelling in a case of developmental dyslexia

This paper explores the relationship between speech and spelling in a single-case study of developmental dyslexia. JM, a developmental dyslexic with a well-documented history of speech, reading and spelling difficulties, was examined when he was 13–14 years old. He still had subtle articulation difficulties causing some disfluency and his use of phonetic voicing was atypical. We argue that these difficulties were recapitulated in his spelling where he was more sensitive to the prosodic aspects of words than normal spellers, exhibiting a strong tendency to spell accurately words which are stressed on the first, rather than the second syllable. He also had more difficulty with phonetic voicing and spelling errors reflected this uncertainty. Thus, when word-specific (orthographic) spelling information is unavailable, JM, like all spellers, must make use of phonological spelling strategies. In his case, these are compromised because of underlying phonological speech problems. It is argued that, while young children make use of a phonological frame on which to organize orthographic information, dyslexics, like JM, who have inadequate phonological representations, are unable to do so. This has a detrimental effect on their acquisition of spelling.     

Auditory processing interventions and developmental dyslexia: a comparison of phonemic and rhythmic approaches

The purpose of this study was to compare the efficacy of two auditory processing interventions for developmental dyslexia, one based on rhythm and one based on phonetic training. Thirty-three children with dyslexia participated and were assigned to one of three groups (a) a novel rhythmic processing intervention designed to highlight auditory rhythmic information in non-speech and speech stimuli; (b) a commercially-available phoneme discrimination intervention; and (c) a no-intervention control. The intervention lasted for 6 weeks. Both interventions yielded equivalent and significant gains on measures of phonological awareness (at both rhyme and phoneme levels), with large effect sizes at the phoneme level. Both programs had medium effect sizes on literacy outcome measures, although gains were non-significant when compared to the controls. The data suggest that rhythmic training has an important role to play in developing the phonological skills that are critical for efficient literacy acquisition. It is suggested that combining both prosodic/rhythmic and phonemic cues in auditory training programs may offer advantages for children with developmental dyslexia. This may be especially true for those who appear resistant to conventional phonics training methods.     

Learning novel phonological representations in developmental dyslexia: associations with basic auditory processing of rise time and phonological awareness

Across languages, children with developmental dyslexia are known to have impaired lexical phonological representations. Here, we explore associations between learning new phonological representations, phonological awareness, and sensitivity to amplitude envelope onsets (rise time). We show that individual differences in learning novel phonological representations are related to individual differences in both rise time categorization and rise time discrimination when non-verbal IQ and short-term memory skills are controlled. This is consistent with the developmental claim that difficulties in the basic auditory processing of rise time cause difficulties in setting up the phonological lexicon from infancy, leading to impairments in phonological awareness.     

The early manifestation of developmental dyslexia: Evidence from German children

The present study retrospectively examined early difficulties with phonological coding and phonemic segmentation of German children who after four years in school were diagnosed as dyslexic. German, in comparison to English, exhibits rather simple and straight-forward grapheme-phoneme correspondences, and the initial teaching approach was phonics oriented. Despite these favorable circumstances for the acquisition of phonological coding, the majority of the later dyslexic children had particular difficulties with the accurate reading of nonwords and of unfamiliar words after about seven months of reading instruction. However, there were enormous differences between the dyslexic children. Two of them were completely unable to blend phonemes into pronunciations, another seven were slow and error prone decoders, and three children had slow and laborious pronunciation assembly as the core problem. The majority of the later dyslexic children also exhibited phonemic segmentation deficits as tested with a nonword spelling task and a phoneme reversal task. In correspondence with findings from older German dyslexic children, the early difficulties with accurate phonological coding and phonemic segmentation were no longer found at the end of grade four. Children then suffered from very slow reading and poor spelling. In general, the difficulties of German dyslexic children emphasize the phonological impairment account of dyslexia. More specifically, these findings suggest that the assembly of letter sounds into pronunciations is particularly affected in the early phase of learning to read a consistent orthography.     

The question of linguistic anomaly in developmental dyslexia

Recent research findings pointing to an anatomical anomaly in the left hemisphere of dyslexics supports the conjecture that dyslexia involves a central anomaly in structural linguistic capacity. Two preliminary studies were carried out to test this conjecture. One study employed the techniques of grammatical research and the other was a reaction time study. Each study provided distinct evidence of a linguistic anomaly. The grammatical study suggested an anomaly when the assignment of referential relations among nominal elements is restricted on the basis of sentence structure, and the reaction time study provided evidence of an anomaly in the exploitation of grammatical markers. Based on a presentation at the 33rd Annual Conference of The Orton Dyslexia Society, San Diego, California, November 1983. I wish to thank Albert Galaburda for many stimulating discussions which led to the preliminary research reported here and the elaboration of that work in continuing studies, he cannot, however, be held accountable for either.     

Ordinary and extraordinary brain development: Anatomical variation in developmental dyslexia

Eight brains, six male and two female, of reliably diagnosed cases of developmental dyslexia have been analyzed in this laboratory thus far. Common to all the specimens is the absence of ordinary asymmetry in the planum temporale, a language relevant area of the temporal lobe. In addition, the male cases and one female case displayed multiple focal areas of malformation of the cerebral cortex, located variably in the language relevant perisylvian regions and to a greater or lesser extent bilaterally. Both female cases and, to a mild degree, one of the males display focal areas of cortical scarring dated to the end of pregnancy through to the end of the second year of life at the latest. The scarring tends to be located in the vascular watershed territories. Experimental animal research suggests that symmetry may represent absence of the necessary developmental pruning of neural networks required for specific functions such as language. This diminished pruning results in excessive neurons and (at least interhemispheric) connections. Additional modeling in experimental animals suggests that cortical malformations and scarring similar to those seen in the dyslexic brains may represent early focal injury that could be attributed to congenital disorders of the immune system. The work reported here has been supported, in part, by NIH grant NICHD 20806, The Orton Dyslexia Society, and the Carl J. Herzog Foundation.     

Teacher identity past and present: What can a genealogy of schooling tell us?

ABSTRACT

The evolution of teachers’ identities in Australia highlights the struggles between state and civic over the control of schooling and also the contingent nature of the teacher identity itself. A genealogical analysis of this history makes visible these contingencies, but more importantly suggests that little reckoning has been afforded to teachers’ agency within these social struggles. This gap in understandings of teacher identity, as even potentially agentic, highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of teachers and their transformative potential. In particular, it calls for a focus on teachers within elite private schools because these costly schools are highly influential as the aspirational model for schooling provision. If teachers’ agency in these neoliberalised spaces were possible, if they could be empowered in their stewardship of the educational enterprise, then their activation would be crucial in any wider reform effort.     

Towards a historical sociology of developmental thinking: the case of generation

This paper presents how the medico‐hygienist model of childhood, which had prevailed throughout the nineteenth century, was replaced at the turn of the twentieth century by the novel developmental model, which arose in the first decades of the 1900s and was later systematised by Piaget, Spock, etc. The medico‐hygienist model revolved around core constituents such as regulation, firmness and discipline, standardisation whose historical specificity could be, according to Elias, related to the civilising process.

The developmental model, on the other hand, is linked to the systematic scientific investigation of childhood and pertains, foremost, to the proposition that growing up was best figured in the concept of development: the figure of the child as a human who develops consistently in time and space. The key element can be worded as follows: Why is such child maturation almost universally constructed as development?

The second crucial idea of the model consists in understanding child development in terms of a (rather linear) sequence of particular stages. The equation of child maturation, both physically and psychologically, with development is crystallised in the figure of a uniform, inevitable and universal sequence of developmental stages and, accordingly, its schedule; therefore, maturation, development, stages and sequences are closely connected to children's socialisation.

My aim is to trace developmental thinking in its historical specificity by bringing to light some neglected social processes that contribute to the regulation of children and the transformation of generational relationships. These processes have always occurred in various societies, andyet I am trying to put forward an original perspective that pertains to the intersection of developmental thinking and social change. I attempt here to introduce a historic juncture of developmental thinking and social transformations that moulded children. I also attempt to track down the historical roots of the developmental framework: how it became the central principle by which we think about children today.