On her back in a dark tube, Blair Smith held still as a scanner combed her brain with magnetic waves. Words flashed by her eyes: tack, vase, hope, glow, vague, cade.

The 11-year-old had been told to press the button in her right hand if the word was real, the button in her left if it was nonsense. The answer itself was less important than the map the scanner would make of which areas of Blair’s brain lighted up when she struggled with a word.

The aim of the study, said Laurie Cutting, director of the Education and Brain Research Program at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, is to understand the neurological differences among students who are skilled readers, those who have difficulties and those with diagnosed learning disabilities.

If neuroscientists can pinpoint which parts of the brain are activated when a reader puzzles over an unknown word, they may eventually help teachers tailor reading instruction for individuals.

That is only the beginning. Many educators hunger for scientific data to help them structure their lessons, and neuroscience is beginning to offer them broad guidance about what works best.

One of the most startling recent revelations in neuroscience has been that the brain’s structure is much more flexible (a concept called neuroplasticity) than was previously thought; this understanding may help teachers find ways to train the brain to better solve math problems or understand a book.

“There’s an awful lot that neuroscience can begin to tell us in broad strokes that’s relevant for education and that ultimately 10 or 20 years downstream can provide us with prescriptive information,” said Robert Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education.

“I think we’re looking at a period of five years of very rich territory for investigation here.”

Complex conditions

Brain research already is opening the way to help teachers detect and address complex conditions — such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia and its mathematical cousin, dyscalculia — that defy blood tests and other simple medical diagnostics.

Cognitive scientists are developing a theory of “micro-development” that could turn some lesson plans upside down. Studies have found that, on a minute-to-minute basis, children and adults learn in fits and starts, often going backward. That could indicate that students should be allowed to grope their way to understanding — for instance, by being asked to power up a light bulb using a battery and a strand of wire before having the theory of electricity explained to them.

How the brain functions remains deeply mysterious, with studies seeming to unfold at a glacial pace. One expert noted that it took decades for researchers, examining data from brain and behavioral studies and other sources, to confirm the belief of many educators that focusing on phonics helps youngsters who struggle with reading.

Still, top educational institutions have recently shown new interest in the link between brain activity and education. Harvard University founded its mind, brain and education degree program in 2002. Johns Hopkins University this year briefed the Maryland State Board of Education on a neuro-education initiative that aims to “explore how current findings have application to educational practice.”

Better ways of teaching

A study published in the journal Nature last month reported a link between a primitive, intuitive sense of the size of numbers and performance in math classes, a finding that could lead to ways to identify young students who may have trouble with math and develop better ways of teaching them. Advocates of expanding pre-kindergarten classes point to studies that show the importance of early education in molding young minds.

Pianta, of the Curry School, said neuroscience has also influenced the education of autistic students.

“Twenty years ago, you might have seen an intervention that was far more oriented toward trying to get those kids to be affectionate, let’s say. Or the therapist in that case would be promoting physical contact with kids who didn’t like physical contact,” Pianta said. “Now we would look at that (response) as sort of saying this kid’s behavior is a result of their brain’s ability to process social, emotional information. You would structure your interactions with an autistic child so as not to overwhelm their capacity to process that information.”

Kurt Fischer, director of Harvard’s mind, brain and education master’s degree program, warned that many educational theories claim to be based on science but are not.

“One of the major problems we face is that there are a whole lot of things that claim to be ‘brain-based education’ that are nonsense,” he said. “One of them is the belief that boys and girls have totally different brains and learn totally differently. That’s not what the evidence shows. Not at all. The other is kind of a rigid idea of sensitive periods: that after a certain age you can’t learn a foreign language. You’ve also heard that there are left-brained and right-brained people. Total nonsense, unless they’ve had their left or right hemisphere removed. All of us use all our brains.”

Craving information

Another example Fischer cited is the widely held but dubious notion that listening to Bach in the bassinet will make babies smarter. Still, Fischer said, the popularity of such ideas shows that educators and the public crave scientific backing for classroom innovations.

At Kennedy Krieger, Cutting gave a nifty copy of her brain scan to Blair, her young research subject. The research team prepared Blair’s identical twin sister to go inside the tube for a new round of scans. They are both perfectly good readers, but the data from their studies might help others.

“Creepy but cool at the same time,” said Blair, an aspiring veterinarian. “It’s good because you help other kids.”

Source: Monterey County Herald, CA
http://www.montereyherald.com/health/ci_10913995

Although school has been back for less than a month, it is likely that many children are already experiencing frustration and confusion in math class. Research at The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada could change the way we view math difficulties and how we assist children who face those problems.

Daniel Ansari is an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Western. He is using brain imaging to understand how children develop math skills, and what kind of brain development is associated with those skills.

Research shows that many children who experience mathematical difficulties have developmental dyscalculia - a syndrome that is similar to dyslexia, a learning disability that affects a child’s ability to read. Children with dyscalculia often have difficulty understanding numerical quantity. For example, they find it difficult to connect abstract symbols, such as a number, to the numerical magnitude it represents. They can’t see the connection, for instance, between five fingers and the number ‘5.’ This is similar to children with dyslexia who have difficulty connecting sounds with letters. In a recent study Ansari and graduate student Ian Holloway showed that children who are better at connecting numerical symbols and magnitudes are also those who have higher math scores. A report of this research is forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

‘Research shows that many children have both dyslexia and dyscalculia. We are now exploring further the question of exactly what brain differences exist between those who have just math problems and those who have both math and reading difficulties,’ says Ansari.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of children with math difficulties, Ansari says that it becomes clear that children with developmental dyscalculia show atypical activation patterns in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex.

This research holds tremendous promise for people who, in the past, had simply accepted that they are ‘not good at math.’ Understanding the causes and brain correlates of dyscalculia may help to design remediation tools to improve the lives of children and adults with the syndrome.

‘We have some cultural biases in North America around math skills,’ says Ansari. ‘We think that people who are good at math must be exceptionally intelligent, and even more dismaying and damaging, we have an attitude that being bad at math is socially acceptable. People who would never dream of telling others they are unable to read, will proclaim publicly they flunked math.’

Ansari says that math skills are hugely important to life success and children who suffer math difficulties may avoid careers that, with help, might be a great fit for them.

Ansari is the recipient of an Early Researcher Award grant from the Ontario government and a CIHR grant. Ansari recently reviewed existing research in this field for the April edition of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and he hopes that news of this important research will also reach parents, teachers and individuals.

An article by Ansari entitled ‘The Brain Goes to School: Strengthening the Education-Neuroscience Connection,’ will be published in the upcoming Education Canada, the magazine of the Canadian Education Association. In the article Ansari says technological advances such as fMRI have provided unprecedented insights into the working of the human brain.

‘A teacher who understands brain structure and function will be better equipped to interpret children’s behaviours, their strengths and weaknesses, from a scientific point of view, and this will in turn influence how they teach,’ says Ansari.

Source: Science Centric, Bulgaria
http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/article.php?q=08102244

Although school has been back for less than a month, it is likely that many children are already experiencing frustration and confusion in math class. Research at The University of Western Ontario in London, Canada could change the way we view math difficulties and how we assist children who face those problems.

Daniel Ansari is an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Western. He is using brain imaging to understand how children develop math skills, and what kind of brain development is associated with those skills.

Research shows that many children who experience mathematical difficulties have developmental dyscalculia – a syndrome that is similar to dyslexia, a learning disability that affects a child’s ability to read. Children with dyscalculia often have difficulty understanding numerical quantity. For example, they find it difficult to connect abstract symbols, such as a number, to the numerical magnitude it represents.

“Research shows that many children have both dyslexia and dyscalculia. We are now exploring further the question of exactly what brain differences exist between those who have just math problems and those who have both math and reading difficulties,” says Ansari.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of children with math difficulties, Ansari says that it becomes clear that children with developmental dyscalculia show atypical activation patterns in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex.

This research holds tremendous promise for people who, in the past, had simply accepted that they are ‘not good at math.’ Understanding the causes and brain correlates of dyscalculia may help to design remediation tools to improve the lives of children and adults with the syndrome.

A report of this research is forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

“We have some cultural biases in North America around math skills,” says Ansari. “We think that people who are good at math must be exceptionally intelligent, and even more dismaying and damaging, we have an attitude that being bad at math is socially acceptable. People who would never dream of telling others they are unable to read, will proclaim publicly they flunked math.”

Ansari says that math skills are hugely important to life success and children who suffer math difficulties may avoid careers that, with help, might be a great fit for them.

An article by Ansari entitled “The Brain Goes to School: Strengthening the Education-Neuroscience Connection,” will be published in the upcoming Education Canada, the magazine of the Canadian Education Association. In the article Ansari says technological advances such as fMRI have provided unprecedented insights into the working of the human brain.

“A teacher who understands brain structure and function will be better equipped to interpret children’s behaviours, their strengths and weaknesses, from a scientific point of view, and this will in turn influence how they teach,” says Ansari.

Source: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080924151007.htm

Times Tables, the Key to Your Child’s Success?

When did you lose interest in math? Never had any? Maybe, but Eugenia Francis knows exactly when it started to happen to her son. The moment? The dread rite of passage all children face: the multiplication tables.

As her son struggled with endless drills, Francis realized there had to be a better way. Why not learn the tables in context of one another and emphasize the commutative property (i.e. 4 x 6 is the same as 6 x 4) of the multiplication tables? Francis drew a grid for tables 1-10 and discovered patterns for her son to decode. The mysteries of the times tables unfolded as a daily exploration of “magic” never discussed in his third-grade class. Their fridge eventually was papered with patterns that made the times tables intriguing. “Patterns made my son smile,” Francis says. “He could see the structure and knew he got it right.”

Ever the creative educator, Francis taught college English. “Patterns whether in literature or math,” she says, “reveal the underlying structure. There is an inherent simplicity in them, an inherent beauty. Math should engage your child’s imagination.”

At the kitchen table, Francis applied her skills to math. Why not learn the tables in order of difficulty? Tables 2, 4, 6 and 8 are easy to learn as they end in some combination of 2-4-6-8-0. Tables for odd numbers also have distinct patterns. Why not a more creative approach? Thus was born Teach Your Child the Multiplication Tables, Fun, Fast and Easy with Dazzling Patterns, Grids and Tricks! (available on Amazon and www.TeaCHildMath.com ) and mom the entrepreneur.

Patterns appeal to children. Learning to recognize patterns teaches analytical skills. A review in California Homeschool News stated: “My daughter thinks it’s lots of fun. She’s already had quite a few ‘ah-ha moments as she recognizes and predicts the various patterns.” Patterns enhance recall. “Children with ADHD, dyslexia and autism do well with my method,” Francis says.

Parents and teachers must ensure children learn the multiplication tables. “Without them a child is doomed,” Francis states. A child who has not mastered the times tables has difficulty succeeding in mathematics beyond the third grade.

A recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times noted that failure to pass Algebra I was the “single biggest obstacle to high school graduation” and that failure to master the multiplication tables was one of the main reasons. A survey of California Algebra I teachers report that 30% of their students do not know the multiplication tables. It is hardly surprising then that fifteen-year olds in the U.S. rank near the bottom of industrialized nations in math skills.

“We have one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world,” Bill Gates stated. “If we keep the system as it is, millions of children will never get a chance to fulfill their promise because of their Zip Code, their skin color or their parents’ income. That is offensive to our values.”

Teachers must innovate and bring the magic of math into the classroom. Parents must do their part. “Parents have a huge influence over a third or fourth grader,” Francis states. “By high school it may be too late. Why not take the opportunity that teaching the multiplication tables provides to give your child a head start in math and develop analytical skills necessary for algebra? Mastery of the multiplication tables is essential to your child’s future.”

Francis published her innovative workbook to help other families. “If more of us would do for other people’s children what we do for our own, the world would be a better place.”

About Eugenia Francis
Eugenia Francis taught English at the University of California at Irvine. Faced with the challenge of teaching her son the multiplication tables, she developed her own innovative method, discovering patterns to the multiplication tables. She has also published a Spanish edition of the workbook. Teach Your Child the Multiplication Tables sells on Amazon in the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany and Japan.

Source: NewsBlaze, CA
http://newsblaze.com/story/20080913052623zzzz.nb/topstory.html

No one can read our thoughts, for now, but some scientists believe they can at least figure out in what language we do our thinking.

Before we utter a single word, experts can gauge our mother tongue and the level of proficiency in other languages by analyzing our brain activity while we read, scientists working with Italy’s National Research Council say.

For more than a year, a team of scientists experimented on 15 interpreters, revealing what they say were surprising differences in brain activity when the subjects were shown words in their native language and in other languages they spoke.

The findings show how differently the brain absorbs and recalls languages learned in early childhood and later in life, said Alice Mado Proverbio, a professor of cognitive electrophysiology at the Milano-Bicocca University in Milan.

Proverbio, who led the study, said such research could help doctors communicate with patients suffering from amnesia or diseases that impair speech. It could also be of use one day in questioning refugee applicants or terror suspects to determine their origin, she said.

The interpreters who took part in the study were all Italians working for the European Union and translating in English and Italian.

“They were extremely fluent in English,” Proverbio said in a telephone interview earlier this month. “We didn’t expect a big difference in brain activity” when they switched from one language to another.

The subjects were asked to look at a screen that flashed words in Italian, English, German as well as nonsensical letter combinations. They were not aware of the purpose of the study and were simply tasked with pressing a button when they spotted a specific symbol, Proverbio said.

Meanwhile, researchers monitored them using an electroencephalograph, or EEG, which measures the brain’s electrical activity through electrodes placed on the scalp. The EEG readout was fed into a computer program that pinpointed the time, intensity and location of the responses evoked in the subjects’ brains by each word.

About 170 milliseconds after a word was shown, the researchers recorded a peak in electrical activity in the left side of the brain, in an area that recognizes letters as part of words before their meaning is interpreted.

These brain waves had a much higher amplitude when the word was in Italian, the language the interpreters had learned before age five.

“The research suggests the differences between the two languages are at a very fundamental level,” said Joseph Dien, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas who was not involved in the study.

Proverbio attributed the differences to the fact the brain absorbs the mother tongue at a time when it is also storing early visual, acoustic, emotional and other nonlinguistic knowledge. This means that the native language triggers a series of associations within the brain that show up as increased electrical activity.

“Our mother tongue is the language we use to think, dream and feel emotion,” Proverbio said.

Offering an example, she said that an English-speaking child would associate the word “knife” with a sharp, cold object that is dangerous and should only be used by adults, while these links would be much weaker and indirect once that person learned the same word in another language later in life.

The only exception would be for those bilingual individuals who learn an extra language before age five.

The findings by Proverbio’s team were published earlier this year in the Biological Psychology journal and have surprised some scientists, particularly because the differences in brain activity show up at a point in the thought process when the brain hasn’t yet interpreted the meaning of the words.

“I didn’t expect such differences at the very beginning of the process,” Dien said in a telephone interview.

“They emerge at a very early level of comprehension,” he said. “It will take a lot more work to work out the implications of that.”

Dien said further research in the area could help understand and treat learning disabilities like dyslexia.

The Italian study also showed links between brain activity and proficiency in other languages. The differences showed up when the translators were shown words in English and in German, a language they knew at a more basic level, Proverbio said.

In this case, the differences in intensity and duration of the brain’s activity were seen some 250 milliseconds after a word was shown, and were traced to areas of the brain used to understand the meaning of words.

This phenomenon had been already discovered by previous studies which, however, had not spotted any difference between the mother tongue and other languages spoken with high proficiency. This had suggested that with some effort “we could all become perfectly bilingual,” Proverbio said. “Unfortunately, that’s not true.”

Source: International Herald Tribune, France
http://tinyurl.com/45dzks

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

Researchers at Auckland University claim that dyscalculia, a learning disability that inhibits the brain’s ability to process numbers and simple mathematics, is suffered by six percent of Auckland’s population. The study was started by Anna Wilson and Karen Waldie in the hopes of finding out why people have the disability. The Dominion Post reports that the research will “try to identify the cognitive and neurological symptoms of Dyscalculia – which means ‘counting badly.’”

The study was based on Aucklanders between the ages o 18 and 35 and looked at the relationship between dyscalculia and dyslexia, a reading disability. Results showed that half of the subjects with dyscalculia also had dyslexia.

Dr. Wilson stresses that not everyone has dyscalculia, pointing out that many people are just “math-phobic.”

The Dominion Post listed five signs of dyscaluia as:

* Did you struggle to learn maths as a child, even in primary school, and despite extra help?

* Have you always had trouble with fast recall of basic addition or multiplication? (e.g. 8+7=?, 7×6=?)

* Do you find that numbers sometimes seem like meaningless symbols to you?

* Do you have trouble estimating, for instance, how much your supermarket shop is going to cost or about how much 236 + 564 is?

* Do you struggle to understand everyday numbers such as statistics in the newspaper or your financial statements?

Source: TransWorldNews, GA
http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=43247&cat=10

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

Uncover how the brains of infants distinguish differences in sounds and it may become possible to correct language problems even before children start to speak, sparing them the difficulties that come from struggling with language.

New studies conducted by Professor of Neuroscience April Benasich and her Infancy Studies Laboratory at Rutgers University in Newark are revealing new and exciting clues about how infant brains begin to acquire language and paving the way for correcting language difficulties at a time when the brain is most able to change.

Benasich and her lab were the first to determine that how efficiently a baby processes differences between rapidly occurring sounds is the best predictor of future language problems. Using methods developed by Benasich and her lab, it can be determined as early as three to six months whether a baby will struggle with language development.

Benasich’s research is now focused on uncovering in specific detail how the developing brain processes and distinguishes acoustic differences that arrive in rapid succession. The ability to differentiate those sounds, such as the difference between “ba” and “da,” is critically important because decoding language requires us to process tiny auditory differences occurring as quickly as 40 milliseconds. During the first months of life, the baby’s developing brain also is involved in constructing an acoustic map of the sounds of his or her native language. That map allows the baby to efficiently acquire language. Apparently, however, in some infants the process seems to go awry.

About 5 to 10 percent of all children beginning school are estimated to have language-learning impairments (LLI) leading to reading, speaking and comprehension problems, according to Benasich. In families with a history of LLI, 40 to 50 percent of children are likely to have a similar problem. Many of these children go on to develop dyslexia.

Using several novel methods, including dense array EEG/ERP recordings, Benasich and her lab are able to analyze EEG, ERPs and the proportion of gamma power in infant brains. The dense sensor array allows the researchers to gently measure a full range of brain activity. Those measurements are obtained by placing a soft bonnet of sensors, resembling a hairnet with lots of little sponges, on a baby’s head and then having the infant listen to different series of rapid tone sequences.

“We are finding that children who have difficulty processing rapid auditory input are not just showing a simple maturational lag, but are actually processing incoming acoustic information differently,” says Benasich.

Specifically, the research shows that babies who struggle with rapid auditory processing appear to be using different brain areas (as shown by neural patterns) and perhaps different analysis strategies to accomplish that task than children who do not have such difficulties. Included among their initial findings, the researchers have found less left hemisphere activity in the brains of children who struggle with rapid auditory processing as compared with matched control children. By pinpointing the exact differences in how the brain handles incoming acoustic information, it may become possible to guide the brains of babies at risk of developing language problems to work more efficiently before the children even begin to speak.

“We can predict with about 90 percent accuracy what a baby’s language capabilities will be just by their response to tones,” says Benasich. “Our hope now is that we will be able to gently guide the brains of infants who are at the highest risk for language learning impairments to be more efficient processors so they can avoid the difficulties that result from struggling with language.”

To shed additional light on how inefficiencies in rapid auditory processing might be corrected, Benasich and her team have developed a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) protocol for scanning naturally sleeping healthy babies. This technique will allow better localization of active brain areas. To solve the challenge of imaging the brains of young children who typically are unable to lie still for extended periods in a scanner, Benasich’s team conducts the scans in the evening and asks the parents to go through their child’s normal bedtime routine, such as reading their infant a story, nursing them, rocking and snuggling. Once the child is asleep, headphones providing a steady stream of lullabies and an acoustic foam bonnet are placed on the baby’s head to reduce the sound of the MRI.

“Our goal is not only to develop training techniques to correct rapid auditory processing problems, but to identify the period during infant development when the brain is most “plastic,” or most able to change through learning,” explains Benasich.

The lab’s work is funded by several sources, including grants from the Solomon Center for Neurodevelopmental Research, the Don and Linda Carter Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and a new $460,000 grant from the Ellison Medical Foundation.

Source: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080410153652.htm

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