Mums can improve their kids academic performance by encouraging them to read more, says an expert.

Sharon Darling, president and founder of the National Centre for Family Literacy has suggested that incorporating a daily reading habit is essential for childrens future academic success.

Many moms wonder what they can do to help their children be successful in school. The answer is surprisingly simple, said Darling.

Many of the things parents do with their children as they work, play, read and talk together have an impact on the skills needed to become a confident and competent student.

Singing songs, making up silly rhymes, talking about what you see, pointing out letters and words in the environment and reading together are just a few activities parents can do, she added.

Creating reading rituals by setting aside a special time and place every day so that they enjoy stories without interruptions.

Moreover, cuddling closely with your child to foster a sense of security can actually eliminate stress that scientists believe produce hormones, which blocks learning.

Mealtimes can be the best opportunity to enhance learning skills.
Various programs have shown success in incorporating mealtime with literacy. In Southern California, the McDonalds Family Mealtime Literacy Nights have resulted in parents using its strategies and materials at home to improve literacy skills.

You can talk to your kids while driving across town or on vacation and looking for signs with words that begin with the same letters as childs name. Each person remembers what the other items were and adds an item that begins with the next letter of the alphabet.

Use techniques for reading that have been proven to increase effectiveness in reading time, providing sound effects to capture their attention, making connections between the spoken and written word because hearing sounds in words is a basic skill needed for reading, talking about the story to reinforce comprehension and memory skills and reading again and again as it helps children recognize and remember words.

Source: Thaindian.com, Thailand
http://tinyurl.com/6oy4zr

For generations, scholars have debated whether language constrains the ways we think. Now, neuroscientists studying reading disorders have begun to wonder whether the actual character of the text itself may shape the brain.

Studies of schoolchildren who read in varying alphabets and characters suggest that those who are dyslexic in one language, say Chinese or English, may not be in another, such as Italian.

Among children raised to read and write Chinese, the demands of reading draw on parts of the brain untouched by the English alphabet, new neuroimaging studies reveal. It’s the same with dyslexia, psychologist Li Hai Tan at Hong Kong Research University and his colleagues reported last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The problems occur in areas not involved in reading other alphabets.

Using two brain-imaging techniques, they identified striking differences in neural anatomy and brain activity between children able to read and write Chinese easily and classmates struggling to keep pace. Both were at odds with patterns of brain activity among readers of the English alphabet.

Even when readers in both languages looked at the same written characters, the brain activity was different, other researchers found. Arabic numerals of standard arithmetic — used by readers of Chinese and English alike — activate different brain regions depending on which of the two languages people had first learned to read, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China’s Dalian University of Technology reported in 2006.

“In this sense, we may regard dyslexia in Chinese and English as two different brain disorders,” Dr. Tan said, “because completely different brain regions are disrupted. It’s very likely that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese would not be dyslexic in English.”

By any measure, reading is a complex and peculiar task. At the speed of thought, readers of English turn letters they see into sounds, sounds into words, and words into meaning. Fluency is measured in milliseconds. Spelling variations are speed bumps in the brain.

Until recently, researchers who study reading abilities focused mostly on Western alphabets. English and 218 other languages, from Alsatian to Zulu, share variations of the same Latin character set. But that set is only one of 60 writing systems used among the world’s remaining 6,912 spoken languages. Even so, those studies convinced many scientists and educators that the brain’s response to the written word, regardless of the language, is universal.

The new research suggests they’re wrong. The schooling required to read English or Chinese may fine-tune neural circuits in distinctive ways.

“We have to recognize that the writing system in China is different, the demands on the brain are different and the characteristics of dyslexia are different,” said Georgetown University pediatric learning specialist Guinevere Eden, who is incoming president of the International Dyslexia Association.

To document the effects on brain development, Dr. Eden and her colleagues are launching a five-year study in Beijing and Washington to compare the neural changes in 60 schoolchildren learning to read either Chinese or English. “Nobody has ever done this across two writing systems,” Dr. Eden said.

In ways that ancient scribes never imagined, text has transformed us. Every brain shaped by reading, whether it is schooled in Chinese or English text, measurably differs — in terms of patterns of energy use and brain structure — from one that has never mastered the written word, comparative brain-imaging studies show. “There are real differences that emerge because of literacy,” Dr. Wolf said.

Some social psychologists speculate that the brain changes caused by literacy could be involved in cultural differences in memory, attention and visual perception. In January’s Psychological Science, MIT researchers reported that European-Americans and students from several East Asian cultures, for example, showed different patterns of brain activation when making snap judgments about visual patterns.

No one knows which came first: habits of thought or the writing system that gave them tangible form. A writing system could be drawn from the archaeology of the mind, perpetuating aspects of mental life conceived at the dawn of civilization.

“Once you have different writing systems in place,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Richard Nisbett. “They may reinforce the perceptual and cognitive trends that preceded the invention of writing. They may go hand in glove.”

Source: Wall Street Journal
http://tinyurl.com/6c4gax

Check-out marketing is genius - strategically placed goodies at the point of purchase, designed to entice the wandering eyes of children. Add parents who are tired, running late or too scared of a public tantrum to say no, and you’ve got yourself a sale.

My three-year-old son recently weaselled his way into a toy mobile phone at the register, but it was tech talent, not pester power, that earned him the score.

With the ease of an expert, he flipped open the phone and began an imaginary phone call to his grandmother, announcing he had a new “mobo” and arranging a time to visit. It was hard not to reward such creativity.

The gadget now joins his already impressive tech collection - a toy laptop, portable DVD player, digital set-top box, walkie-talkie and a Nintendo Wii, which his father argued would be great exercise thanks to its motion-sensing remote.

Granted, our junior geek comes from a tech-savvy family, but he’s not uncommon among his generation. Tots of the 21st century have been wired from the womb, with the rise of interactive tech toys such as LeapFrog’s learning system, computer tuition that now begins at kindergarten and “switched on” parents role-modelling the digital age of computers, mobiles and portable media.

The question is: how good is that early tech exposure for our kids, and are the bytes and buttons holding them back from important development that can’t be gained on a machine?

Private tech educators such as Computer Gym and ComputerTots, which run weekly half-hour computer classes at pre-schools across the country, argue there are educational rewards from the preschool PC program where three and four-year-olds learn how to open a document, surf the net and navigate through software.

ComputerTots director Sheri Borman, a trained psychologist and mother of three, says their computer classes are preparing pre-schoolers for primary education, introducing them to the building blocks of mathematics and reading.”

The menu that they navigate through is a left-to-right progression like reading, and you can give a character like a robot a sequence of instructions, which is an important part of mathematics,” Mrs Borman says.

The former crisis counsellor refers to more than a dozen research studies that demonstrate pre-school children who are exposed to technology in a structured way have better schoolreadiness skills, better verbal skills and better cognitive skills. In one US study, four-year-olds with computer skills had IQs that were on average 12 points higher.

“Most of the time it’s working on a computer, but it could also be using a digital microscope or a video camera.

“It’s about submerging the children in a technological culture because we don’t want children to be intimidated by (software such as) Adobe Photoshop; we want them, even at kindergarten level, not to be fearful of trying technology.”

Computer Gym’s director Chris Bouwmeester says its pre-school computer classes reach 2000 children nationally, but demand has changed very little in the past 15 years.

What has shifted is parental expectation that early childhood education will include computers.

“One of the biggest restrictions facing parents is having appropriate software that remains engaging for children. Parents might have one or two such titles, but it’s hard to cover the range of topics that we do - that’s one of the reasons parents appreciate the service,” Mr Bouwmeester says.

What both kiddie computer groups agree on is that the ultimate benefit of the tech classes for tots lies not in the curriculum but in the personal interaction and social experience.

“Our teachers are with the children and can build on the learning experience they are getting - very different from plonking a child in front of a computer and letting them go for it,” Mr Bouwmeester says. “The lessons are valuable for children because they are in a group - having a great laugh and sharing discoveries and experiences.”

Leading pediatric researcher and author Professor Frank Oberklaid, who is the director of the Centre for Community Child Health at the Royal Children’s Hospital, says before the age of five a child needs one thing above all else to fully develop their brain - people.

“What children need more than anything in those early years is relationships so they can learn to socialise, take turns, deal with frustrations. That’s infinitely more important than anything else,” he says.

What concerns him about the rising interest in tech toys and tuition is the unfounded belief that parents are giving their children a head start in learning.

“Do children of today need to learn computer skills? Yes, of course. It’s the new literacy,” Professor Oberklaid says. “But there’s a real concern about “hothousing” - exposing two, three and four-year-olds to stimulating activities like Baby Einstein and flash cards that help teach your child to read by three. There’s no evidence that ‘hothousing’ makes any long-term difference (to education).”

He says the commercialism of “hothousing” is simply preying on the guilt of middle-class parents who want to give children the best of everything, with technology the latest arena in which to compete.

“I’m concerned about the pressure on parents,” Professor Oberklaid says. “Hugh Mackay calls it the ‘overscheduled’ child. I’ve seen it in my patients. Technology is one more pressure on guilty parents.”

Child psychologist Evelyn Field believes working parents and our culture of “busyness” has created a generation of passive parents, who often turn to “cyberia” for baby-sitting.

“Parents are scrambling towards technology. They’re busy and tired and under pressure and a lot of them don’t have the time or energy. They’re putting children in front of the screen, and you can’t blame them,” she says.

Ms Field says the problem with unsupervised tech time is that young children can miss out on wide-ranging experiences such as creative play, exercise and friendships.

“Life changes all the time. Even if you watch the fish pond or the clouds every day, it’s going to change, but you don’t have the same variety of combinations on a digital screen,” she says. “It’s so important that kids get sensory experience to build the brain in the first three to four years of life.”

Dr Joe Tucci, CEO of the Australian Childhood Foundation, says the latest research shows that excessive tech consumption by children can lead to depression, anxiety and aggression.

“Technology tends to be an isolating experience,” he says. “Some of the problems we’re seeing with aggression and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) in kids can be traced back to socially limiting experiences that technology forces kids to have.”

Child psychiatrist Professor Philip Graham, of London’s Institute of Child Health, also notes an increase in children’s mental health problems over the last quarter of the 20th century - which coincides with the dawn of the computer age and rising consumerism.

He says a recent survey in Britain showed that adults are concerned about the negative impact of materialism on children, incuding devices such as iPods, computers and mobile phones.

“Children have always been acquisitive and always will be, but increasingly they are defined by what they own rather than what they are,” he told Livewire.

Dr Tucci says that while some of these tech toys offer important stimulation, they’re also priming toddlers to be consumers before their time. “Yes, it’s cute and it’s role-playing, but equally it’s also preparing children to be consumers, and that’s the rub.”

All the experts agree that the healthiest way to introduce young kids to technology is with supervision and limits - no more than two hours of technology time a day with a balance of activity both indoors and outdoors, alone and in a group, involving both structured and free play.

Dr Tucci warns that to combat ballooning rates of child obesity, brain games need to be curbed to allow for real life action. “Unlike activities like sport or reading, technology has the potential to swamp children because it is so exciting with all of the colour and movement,” he says.

“We have to ground children in the physical space to learn about their bodies. Otherwise we’ve got a job in front of us to make exercise as exciting and interesting as technology.”

Dubbed the “genius” in her play group, two-year old Annika displays the makings of an IT whizz, having already mastered redial on her mother’s mobile, the CD-ROM and the TV remote.

“If she wants to talk to her Nanny she just presses and holds number 3 on my mobile,” says her mum, Donna Evans.

“Yesterday she rang my mother-in-law. I have to put the mobile phone out of her reach now.”

While Annika’s parents are happy to foster the tech interest, they’re also wary of overexposure. “We make sure she’s not a drone in front of the TV. We also incorporate a lot of the imaginary toys, like the kitchen appliances, so that she’s role playing and not just pressing buttons.”

Ms Evans admits she likes the learning benefits of Annika’s tech talent - as long as it remains enjoyable.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m pushing her learning, but she has the potential to be bright quite young and the tech stuff really gives her an interest in learning. I just don’t want an expectation placed on her to perform.”

The couple are also considering the unstructured education of Montessori, which doesn’t introduce computers until primary level.

“The Montessori perspective is that young children before the age of six need to learn with their hands,” Montessori trainer Amy Kirkham says.

“Computers tend to be more abstract, which is why we don’t use them until primary school.” Young mum Sandra Griffin says her friends always joke that her three-year-old son, Matt, is going to be in IT when he grows up.

He’s already mastered the computer, he has a list of his favourite websites and performs regular virus checks on the PC.

Thanks to the online games he plays he knows his colours, the alphabet, patterns and some basic maths, including counting to 20.

“I honestly believe that computers are a valuable tool in teaching kids,” Ms Griffin explains.

“Not only has it helped with Mattie’s knowledge and brain development but it also helped his fine motor skills and increased his attention span to the point where at just three years of age he can concentrate on one activity for an hour.”

The only downside is what it’s costing the family in gadgets - including a Nintendo DS for the next birthday - and $70 for each game after that.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
http://tinyurl.com/3p7a7s

Science has finally caught up with what mothers have been saying for years: they are super-women with super-powers thanks to an influx of hormones during pregnancy and labour to enable them to cope with the demands of child rearing.

Neuroscientists have discovered that women’s brains are rewired during that period, making them faster, more robust and less stressed than before.

Professor Craig Kinsley, a neuroscientist at the University of Richmond, Virginia, found the lifelong transformation is caused by an influx of hormones, including estrogen and oxytocin, to the brain.

The revolutionary findings could lead to a new world of chemical therapies to transform “bad” mothers or those who are not maternal into “super mums”.

Professor Kinsley said, if females with a deficit of the brain chemical oxytocin can be identified, then “when they are first interacting with the baby you can give them a boost of oxytocin at a critical time”.

Sydney career woman Kim McGee supports the study results.

She said she was never “overly maternal” and had no burning desire to have children. However, two babies later, she has surprised herself at how much more efficient and smarter she has become.

“Even my husband says: `You’re very different’,” Ms McGee said.

“In a way you have more energy as you have two other people who are solely relying on you.”

Ms McGee said caring for two young children was hectic but she had learned to juggle it with full-time work in the finance industry.

“I think that the more women have to do, and the bigger the challenge, the more successful they are at it,” she said.

Professor Kinsley’s research was inspired by his wife’s ability to automatically tackle new tasks with the birth of their daughter. His wife went from being “ambivalent” about children to becoming a “super mum”.

“It was some biological change,” he said.

Laboratory tests on rats showed that the “reservoir of hormones” released enhance a mother’s ability to care for and protect her offspring.

These improvements in behaviour last a lifetime until a woman is in her 80s, he said.

“Our work is showing that, when a female becomes pregnant, her brain is changing dramatically. This is an important developmental period in her life.”

In the experiments, young mother rats showed better maze negotiation skills and memory, and decreased levels of stress and fear.

Professor Kinsley said it suggests the power of motherhood, of how it makes the brain more plastic and flexible, enabling it to respond to the demands of survival.

Dr Karleen Gribble, of the University of Western Sydney, said the influx of oxytocin during labour decreased a woman’s stress levels, making her more responsive to the baby.

“Mothering changes your brain, and part of the way it is changing is via the impact of a hormone like oxytocin,” she said.

Dr Sarah Buckley, who has researched the impact of oxytocin on mothers, said the hormone “reorganised the structure of the brain”.

“A lot of things women do in early parenting such as breastfeeding and holding the baby helps to keep oxytocin being released in a mother’s brains,” Dr Buckley said.

Source: NEWS.com.au, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,26278,23603717-5007185,00.html

A study of a research team of the State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), demonstrated for the first time that brains of dyslexics differ in readers of different languages.

The study, which compared dyslexic children who are readers of Chinese to those of English, indicated structural and functional differences between both groups. The findings implied that dyslexia may be different neurological conditions in readers of different languages. This research may help tailor-making therapies for children who grow up in different cultures.

The work “A structural-functional basis for dyslexia in the cortex of Chinese readers” by Dr Siok Wai Ting and her colleagues in HKU was published in April 2008 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) of the United States of America, a prestigious international multi-disciplinary scientific journal. Dr Siok is Principal Investigator of the State Key Laboratory and Assistant Professor of Linguistics.

Developmental dyslexia affects 7% to 9% of children in Hong Kong, and up to 17% throughout the world. It results in a severe learning disability in acquiring reading skills.

Previous neuroimaging studies have revealed that dyslexic readers of alphabetic languages like English have decreased gray-matter volume in posterior brain systems, and have weak reading-related activity in the left temporoparietal and occipitotemporal regions of the brain.

In order to assess whether these abnormalities were universal, or culture-dependent, Dr Siok said her team had been studying dyslexic Chinese children. She explained that while alphabetic languages like English were learnt using letter-to-sound conversion rules, pronunciations in a non-alphabetic language like written Chinese, which is composed of square-shaped or picture-like characters, must be memorized by rote.

In this latest study, the team used two brain imaging techniques.

Firstly, voxel-based morphometry, an established whole-brain gray-matter assessment technique, was used to analyze the high-resolution 3D anatomical images acquired with magnetic resonance images (MRIs) from 16 Chinese dyslexic subjects and 16 age-matched normal children as controls. The children, who were studying in Beijing primary schools, were all native speakers of Putonghua, on average aged 11, and all strongly right-handed.

It was found that the gray-matter volume in the left middle frontal gyrus region, which is important for the coordination of cognitive resources in working memory and previously has been shown to play a role in Chinese reading and writing, was significantly smaller in dyslexic children than in normal subjects. But at the same time, their more posterior brain systems remained unaffected. Previous studies have revealed that dyslexic English readers have decreased gray-matter volume in their posterior regions.

Secondly, a functional MRI experiment was conducted on a subset of 12 of each of the dyslexics and control groups. They were asked to decide whether two Chinese characters viewed simultaneously rhymed with each other. The rhyme judgment task involves phonological processing which would reflect in activation of some regions in the brain. It was found that the normal subjects had much stronger activation of the left middle frontal gyrus region during the task than the dyslexic group. The dyslexic Chinese readers demonstrated little activation in the posterior brain regions related to reading-related activity in English readers.

The fact that Chinese and Western dyslexics show structural abnormalities in different brain regions suggests that dyslexia may even be two different brain disorders in the two streams of culture.

“What causes brain structure abnormalities for dyslexia is currently unknown. Previous genetic studies suggest that malformations of brain development are associated with mutations of several genes and that developmental dyslexia has a genetic basis. Our brain imaging findings may well provide useful clues for further genetic studies in dyslexia,” said HKU’s Professor of Linguistics Tan Li-Hai, who is also Principal Investigator of the State Key Laboratory.

Dr Siok, lead author of the study, said the study would certainly help in the development of more efficient tests for early identification of Chinese children with reading disabilities, and more effective strategies to remediate dyslexia, tailored made for Chinese.

Dr Siok explained that the left middle frontal gyrus is responsible for working memory and is spatially close to the motor cortex, whereas the left posterior brain areas are involved in letter-to-sound mappings and are spatially close to the auditory cortex. “Our findings suggest that educational intervention for Chinese dyslexia may involve working memory and sensorimotor tasks. Current treatments of English dyslexia already use the aspects of letter-sound conversions and phonological awareness“, she said. (…)

Source: ScienceBlog.com, CA
http://tinyurl.com/5v8wpr

Like many children, 2-year-old Avery Feneov loves to sing. But her song selection is a little worldlier than your average toddler.

While most American kids are learning to speak English, Avery is also learning to speak Mandarin.

“The brain doesn’t just turn on automatically at 4 when most schools start teaching language. The brain turns on from the very beginning and it’s ready to take on new language,” said Lauren Seilg, Avery’s mother.

The language school Avery goes to, called “Sponge,” teaches Spanish, French, Japanese and Mandarin to children as old as 5 years, and as young as 5 weeks.

“Babies are really primed to learn language from birth. And so, when we give exposure at a young age it take advantage of the way the babies are learning,” said Jackie Friedman Mighdoll, the founder of Sponge.

Before she opened the school in 2005, she spent years developing a language program especially for kids.

“The kids do activities, games, snacks, song, dance and the older kids do some art too. All things that they are really engaged in and have fun,” she said.

After almost two years of classes, Avery’s parents are pleased with their daughters growing vocabulary.

“She can repeat all the words the teacher tells her, she picks up on all the words the teacher tells her, so dozens. As many as she possibly can,” said dad Kyril Feneov.”

“Children who grow up with more than one language really grow up and appreciate that there can be differences and similarities and that we’re all part of that world,” said Mighdoll.

Sponge school has become so popular they opened a second school in Issaquah.

Source: KING5.com, WA
http://tinyurl.com/6pr4s6

They are age-old questions, from the moment of birth: What’s your baby thinking? How much does your child really understand?

“They’re not just wailing away. There’s something going on that’s important to their development, right from the very beginning,” said speech professor Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington.

Researchers at the UW are now using baby caps that can detect the most minute electrical current being sent out by a baby’s brain.

Little Isabella is listening to a very unusual audio tape.

To most adults the syllables all sound alike, but in fact they are just slightly different. Believe it or not, Isabella, who isn’t even yet talking, can tell the difference and her brain waves prove it.

“Their brains are set automatically to capture this information in ways that are completely surprising,” said Kuhl.

Kuhl and her husband, psychology professor Andy Meltzoff, are two of the world’s top scientists in the growing field of early learning.

Their research has shown up in every major magazine. Their book, The Scientist in the Crib, is now published in French, German, Chinese - more than 10 languages in all.

Several years ago, they started the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, bringing together 50 scientists at the UW, studying both the brain and behavior, and discovering that babies understand far more than parents or scientists ever thought possible.

“Babies learn more in the first three years of life than we ever will again,” said Dr. Meltzoff.

What we know is they learn by copying us. In a very simple experiment, Dr. Meltzoff stuck out his tongue and found that even a two-week-old baby knows how to imitate.

“It shows that they’re born learning. Really, babies are born learning,” he said.

Perhaps more remarkable is what Dr. Meltzoff discovered with slightly older babies. If you show them how to play with a toy, even if you don’t let them imitate immediately, they will save it in their brain. They’ll imitate you when you give them the toy - up to four months later, demonstrating that babies have incredible memory.

“Often times, the parents would say, oh I know I’ve seen that toy before, but I can’t remember what to do with it. And the baby would do the right thing,” said Dr. Meltzoff.

“That’s what’s different about the brain of a baby,” said Dr. Kuhl.

Meanwhile, Dr. Kuhl has spent years focusing on language. What struck her is that all mothers have a special way of talking to a baby.

Kuhl calls it “motherese,” or “parentese,” because dads do it naturally too.

Why do we talk that way? Are babies getting anything out of it?

It turns out they are.

“The vowels, if you measure ee, ah and ooh, in words like sheep and shoe and keys, they’re much more distinct in motherese. They’re further apart acoustically. It’s like being able to show a baby, here’s what to listen for. Here are the components,” said Dr. Kuhl.

She discovered that babies learn about language long before they utter their first word.

In a speech lab, she took 9-month-old babies and exposed them to a second language, either Spanish or Mandarin. And after just 12 sessions over one month, the babies could detect subtle phonetic sounds in the foreign language.

“The babies in the United States, exposed in that way, are as good as the babies in Taiwan for example, at hearing the Chinese distinctions,” said Dr. Kuhl.

Isabella was exposed to Spanish for a month, which is why she now distinguishes sounds that most English-only speakers cannot.

In another lab, Dr. Meltzoff is studying the crucial moment when a baby learns not just to look at mom, but to follow where mom’s eyes are focused.

He said 10-month-old babies, who are good at following where an adult is gazing, had about twice as many words in their speech eight months later.

“So when she’s around in the living room and says, ‘here’s a rattle, look at the rattle,’ the babies need to know to follow where she’s looking and that’s what the word refers to,” he said.

All these studies suggest that babies are learning an incredible amount that first year, and yet scientists cannot explain why we as adults have no specific memories of our time as babies.

We’re tempted to think maybe there isn’t that much going on in their brains, but Kuhl and Meltzoff say it’s just the opposite, that babies absorb culture, language, social interaction, emotions - the most basic building blocks of who they’ll become some day.

“The news is that babies are even learning from their peers at day-care centers, and learning from us so we’re role models right from the beginning,” said Dr. Kuhl.

“It is lasting learning. It’s the kind of learning that makes a profound effect on the baby’s brain and mental operations, and that sets them up for later.”

Source: KING5.com, WA
http://tinyurl.com/6a7zh6

Dyslexia affects different parts of children’s brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. That finding, reported in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, means that therapists may need to seek different methods of assisting dyslexic children from different cultures.

“This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics’ brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese,” said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. “Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia.”

Millions of children worldwide are affected by dyslexia, a language-based learning disability that can include problems in reading, spelling, writing and pronouncing words. The International Dyslexia Association says there is no consensus on the exact number because not all children are screened, but estimates range from 8 percent to 15 percent of students.

Reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese, which relies less on sound representation, instead using symbols to represent words.

Past studies have suggested that the brain may use different networks of neurons in different languages, but none has suggested a difference in the structural parts of the brain involved, Tan explained.

Tan’s research group studied the brains of students raised reading Chinese, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. They then compared those findings with similar studies of the brains of students raised reading English.

Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University in Washington, said the process of becoming a skilled reader changes the brain.

“Becoming a reader is a fairly dramatic process for the brain,” explained Eden, who was not part of Tan’s research team on this paper.

For children, learning to read is culturally important but is not really natural, Eden said, so when the brain orients toward a different writing system it copes with it differently.

For example, English-speaking children learn the sounds of letters and how to combine them into words, while Chinese youngsters memorize hundreds of symbols which represent words.

“The implication here is that when we see a reading disability, we see it in different parts of the brain depending on the writing system that the child is born into,” Eden said.

That means, “we cannot just assume that any dyslexic child is going to be helped by the same kind of intervention,” she said in a telephone interview.

Tan said the new findings suggest that treating Chinese speakers with dyslexia may use working memory tasks and tests relating to sensor-motor skills, while current treatments of English dyslexia focus on letter-sound conversions and sound awareness.

He said the underlying cause of brain structure abnormalities in dyslexia is currently unknown.

“Previous genetic studies suggest that malformations of brain development are associated with mutations of several genes and that developmental dyslexia has a genetic basis,” he said in an interview via e-mail.

“We speculate that different genes may be involved in dyslexia in Chinese and English readers. In this respect, our brain-mapping findings can assist in the search for candidate genes that cause dyslexia,” Tan said.

In their paper, the researchers noted that imaging studies of the brains of dyslexic children using alphabetic languages like English have identified unusual function and structure in the left temporo-parietal areas, thought to be involved in letter-to-sound conversions in reading; left middle-superior temporal cortex, thought to be involved in speech sound analysis, and the left inferior temporo-occipital gyrus, which may function as a quick word-form recognition system.

When they performed similar imaging studies on dyslexic Chinese youngsters, on the other hand, they found disruption in a different area, the left middle frontal gyrus region.

The study was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the University of Hong Kong.

In a separate paper, published two years ago, University of Michigan researchers reported that Asians and North Americans see the world differently.

Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene.

Source: The Associated Press
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hobiJ-tiOnp79R-0onuBx8oMn2CwD8VT8R1G1

We are drawn to a baby face, whether or not we claim to like children. Our brain can’t help itself. Our neurons reflexively respond to an infant’s big eyes, broad forehead, button nose and tiny chin, University of Oxford researchers recently reported in the online journal PLoS One.

Using a technique called magneto-encephalography that measures brain signals, the Oxford researchers found that a baby’s face can seize our attention in milliseconds, activating an unusual mental organ called the fusiform gyrus that responds to human faces. Moreover, these distinctive infant features, unlike the mature features of an adult, trigger a sense of reward and good feeling in a seventh of a second. Picture Bambi’s saucer-size eyes or those of Mickey Mouse.

The researchers concluded that the parental instinct is present in all of us. “It suggests we are probably all hard-wired to respond and care for babies, to help us perpetuate the species,” said Oxford child psychiatrist Alan Stein, who helped conduct the experiment. “The response to an infant face is too fast to be under conscious control.”

If so, where did brain cells and synapses learn anything about a face? The question goes deeper than surface appearances. Our ability to distinguish faces deftly is central to a debate about the anatomy of knowledge.

“Why do we have special regions of the brain for some higher-level abilities but not for others?” asked neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher, who studies visual perception and cognition at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “Are they innate? Are they learned?”

Many scientists, in fact, remain convinced that the brain’s intimate knowledge of faces is a byproduct of its ability to capture the visual essence of any object. “You can show that parts of the brain most selective for faces are also responsive to cars in a car expert and birds in a bird expert,” said psychologist Isabel Gauthier at Vanderbilt University.

To our eyes, every face is a unique volume in the library of human nature. We read its language of expressions at a glance, fluently translating a curled lip, raised eyebrow or averted gaze. “There are billions of faces in the world, and we can recognize them all and tell them all apart,” said UCLA neuropsychologist Susan Bookheimer.

On average, the brain takes only 200 milliseconds to tell one face from another, responding swiftly and selectively to cues of gender, ethnicity and identity, University of Southern California scientists reported recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So attuned are we to the pattern of eyes, nose and mouth that we can see faces where none exist: in cloud banks or rock formations on Mars, and even in the shape of a cinnamon bun said to resemble Mother Teresa. When that neural ability falters, as in autism, we can find friendly faces threatening. In a rare disorder called prosopagnosia, we can’t recognize faces at all.

Through brain-scanning experiments, researchers have located the neurochemical essence of our face expertise in a strip of temporal-lobe tissue about two inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide. Studying this face recognition area in macaque monkeys, neurobiologist Doris Tsao at the University of Bremen, Germany, reported in Science that the tissue consisted almost entirely of neurons that responded just to faces.

To understand how the tissue develops, Yoichi Sugita at Japan’s Neuroscience Research Institute raised infant monkeys for two years without ever showing them a face. Lab workers wore hoods. When faces were finally revealed to them, the monkeys could readily tell them apart, Dr. Sugita reported in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It is mind-blowing,” Dr. Kanwisher said. “If you had to bet, you would bet it is innate.”

Source: WSBT-TV, IN
http://www.wsbt.com/news/health/17316199.html

People in London are losing £523m a year due to poor maths and English skills, a report has claimed.

The money is lost in not being able to check bills or get the best phone tariffs, a survey by learndirect shows.

The provider of numeracy and literacy skills looked at basic skills across 20 towns and cities in the UK.

Stoke-on-Trent was where people lost the most (£88 per head), Londoners were next (£74) and Leeds was the city to lose least (£11).

Learndirect claims £1.45bn was lost across Britain as a result of poor maths and English abilities.

Confidence hit

It has launched the ME-Q Index, the maths and English quotient, which shows how much money people are losing year on year.

It said almost 100,000 admitted to losing more than £1,000 last year due to basic skills issues like bill miscalculations, adding or taking away VAT, or the multiplication or division involved in working out foreign currency when abroad.

Sally Coady, from learndirect, said: “This research demonstrates the effects of the skills gap in the UK very clearly with the huge financial cost.

“A lack of maths and English skills can really hit you in the pocket but there is also a cost to people’s confidence.

“Some people will go to great lengths to avoid using their maths and English and it can hold them back in many areas from advancing their careers or helping their kids with homework.” (…)

Source: BBC News, UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/7304645.stm