This article discusses: (1) evolution of the concept of selective underachievement in reading; (2) evidence that reading disorders are linked to written language and speech problems; and (3) anatomical, physiological, and biochemical aspects of brain research. Specialized medical instruments do not yet replace good clinical observation for…

A review of studies into the neurological aspects of reading disabilities indicates that two positions have been taken with regard to the brain and reading: (1) language skills are generally considered to be the function of the left hemisphere of the brain; and (2) very poor reading may be related to bilateral spatial processing for both boys and…

In this article Tortora, a dance therapist, interviews Myron Hofer, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Columbia University. Dr. Hofer has spent decades studying how the mother's behaviors and actions shape and regulate the physiological, neurophysiological, and psychological functioning of her babies--specifically,…

We examined the development of some features of morphosyntactic ability, specifically the acquisition of auxiliaries and use of agreement marking, along with sentence processing capacity. We used a conceptually simple task called the Tags Question Task, which is a method for evaluating a number of language processes in the production of a commonly…

Learning to associate a conditioned (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US) results in changes in the processing of CS information. Here, we address directly the question whether chemical appetitive conditioning of "Lymnaea" feeding behavior involves changes in the peripheral and/or central processing of the CS by using extracellular recording…

Large gains in performance, evolving hours after practice has terminated, were reported in a number of visual and some motor learning tasks, as well as recently in an auditory nonverbal discrimination task. It was proposed that these gains reflect a latent phase of experience-triggered memory consolidation in human skill learning. It is not clear,…

Recent research on Chinese orthography is reviewed in a discussion of the relationship between orthographic symbols and reading processes. Specifically, these issues are addressed with relation to research findings: the difficulty of learning Chinese logographs, particularly with regard to learning disabilities and biliteracy; whether reading in…

The work of connectionist researchers is examined in order to understand better the implications for modeling second language learning processes. Connectionism is a biologically-oriented framework for understanding complex behavior, and provides a modeling tool (computer simulation) that behaves and learns without rules being explicitly wired into…

Suggestopedia, the psycholinguistic second language teaching methodology of Georgi Lozanov, has received both favorable and unfavorable evaluations from well-known scholars in the field of language learning. Some suspicious views by Western scholars may be due to the paucity of interpretable scientific evidence for the method's claims. An…

The left hemisphere of the brain is analytic and "particularistic" in orientation--focusing on individual elements within a field and analyzing them sequentially. The right hemisphere of the brain is holistic or relational in processing, and is predisposed to see wholes simultaneously. One of the most prominant features of the EEG is the asymmetry…

It was reasoned that if the right ear/left brain hemisphere is more efficient than the left ear/right hemisphere at extracting the meaning of a sentence, then verbatim information presented to the right ear may be more difficult to retrieve than verbatim information presented to the left ear immediately after the sentence is heard. This idea was…

Applied linguistic theory is examined in light of neuroscientific knowledge, especially in regard to the structure and function of the cerebral cortex, in order to illuminate the process and methods of teaching or learning language. Wernicke's Area and Broca's Area are parts of the brain that have been associated with language function.…

The nine papers in this book discuss aspects of language processing that contribute to reading difficulty. After a summary of the 1974 World Congress on Dyslexia, at which these papers were presented, the following subjects are examined: historical background and educational treatment of dyslexia; the structure of language; neuroanatomy underlying…

Research is being conducted to determine the factors behind linguistic retardation in children. A first question raised was whether the linguistic system of the deviant child is qualitatively different from that of a normal child. A matching-up of deviant and normal children according to linguistic level suggests that the onset of base syntax may…

This report on speech research contains 21 papers describing research conducted on a variety of topics concerning speech perception, processing, and production. The initial two reports deal with brain function in speech; several others concern ear function, both in terms of perception and information processing. A number of reports describe…