scholarly journals Right-hemisphere coherence to speech at pre-reading stages predicts reading performance one year later

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Ríos López ◽  
Nicola Molinaro ◽  
Mathieu Bourguignon ◽  
Marie Lallier

The hypothesis that neural entrainment to the low-frequency modulations of speech contributes significantly to reading acquisition receives increasing support in the literature. Still, no previous study has actually attempted to establish a longitudinal link between them. The present study tested Basque-speaking children twice: once before reading was formally instructed (t1; 5-6 years old) and once after they had received a full school year of reading instruction (t2; 6-7 years old). At t1, speech-brain coherence was recorded via EEG. At t2, in addition to the coherence measure, reading performance was assessed. Our results show that children with larger pre-reading delta-band (< 1 Hz) speech-brain coherence at right sites of the scalp performed better in the reading tasks one year later. Moreover, the increase in coherence from pre-reading into reading stages tended to correlate negatively with reading outcome. The latter result, though statistically weak, suggests that reading instruction might lead to the recruitment of less delta tracking resources. Overall, our results provide preliminary support for a relevant contribution of right-hemisphere speech-brain coherence to successful reading development and point towards pre-reading neural coherence indexes as useful tools for the early detection of developmental reading disorders.

2021 ◽  
pp. 026565902110142
Author(s):  
Meghan Vollebregt ◽  
Jana Leggett ◽  
Sherry Raffalovitch ◽  
Colin King ◽  
Deanna Friesen ◽  
...  

There is growing recognition of the need to end the debate regarding reading instruction in favor of an approach that provides a solid foundation in phonics and other underlying language skills to become expert readers. We advance this agenda by providing evidence of specific effects of instruction focused primarily on the written code or on developing knowledge. In a grade 1 program evaluation study, an inclusive and comprehensive program with a greater code-based focus called Reading for All (RfA) was compared to a knowledge-focused program involving Dialogic Reading. Phonological awareness, letter word recognition, nonsense word decoding, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, written expression and vocabulary were measured at the beginning and end of the school year, and one year after in one school only. Results revealed improvements in all measures except listening comprehension and vocabulary for the RfA program at the end of the first school year. These gains were maintained for all measures one year later with the exception of an improvement in written expression. The Dialogic Reading group was associated with a specific improvement in vocabulary in schools from lower socioeconomic contexts. Higher scores were observed for RfA than Dialogic Reading groups at the end of the first year on nonsense word decoding, phonological awareness and written expression, with the differences in the latter two remaining significant one year later. The results provide evidence of the need for interventions to support both word recognition and linguistic comprehension to better reading comprehension.


Author(s):  
Paula Ríos-López ◽  
Nicola Molinaro ◽  
Mathieu Bourguignon ◽  
Marie Lallier

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Nouri ◽  
R. Ebrahimpour ◽  
A. Mirzaei

AbstractModulation of beta band fioscillatory activity (15-30 Hz) by delta band oscillatory activity (1-3 Hz) in the cortico-basal ganglia loop is important for normal basal ganglia functions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this modulation are poorly understood. To understand the mechanisms underlying such frequency modulations in the basal ganglia, we use large scale subthalamo-pallidal network model stimulated via a delta-frequency input signal. We show that inhibition of external Globus Pallidus (GPe) and excitation of the Subthalamic nucleus (STN) using the delta-band stimulation leads to the same delta-beta interactions in the network model as the experimental results observed in healthy basal ganglia. In addition, we show that pathological beta oscillations in the network model decorrelates the delta-beta link in the network model. In general, using our simulation results, we propose that striato-pallidal inhibition and cortico-subthalamic excitation are the potential sources of the delta-beta link observed in the intact basal ganglia.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 1990
Author(s):  
Vinod Devaraj ◽  
Philipp Aichinger

The characterization of voice quality is important for the diagnosis of a voice disorder. Vocal fry is a voice quality which is traditionally characterized by a low frequency and a long closed phase of the glottis. However, we also observed amplitude modulated vocal fry glottal area waveforms (GAWs) without long closed phases (positive group) which we modelled using an analysis-by-synthesis approach. Natural and synthetic GAWs are modelled. The negative group consists of euphonic, i.e., normophonic GAWs. The analysis-by-synthesis approach fits two modelled GAWs for each of the input GAW. One modelled GAW is modulated to replicate the amplitude and frequency modulations of the input GAW and the other modelled GAW is unmodulated. The modelling errors of the two modelled GAWs are determined to classify the GAWs into the positive and the negative groups using a simple support vector machine (SVM) classifier with a linear kernel. The modelling errors of all vocal fry GAWs obtained using the modulating model are smaller than the modelling errors obtained using the unmodulated model. Using the two modelling errors as predictors for classification, no false positives or false negatives are obtained. To further distinguish the subtypes of amplitude modulated vocal fry GAWs, the entropy of the modulator’s power spectral density and the modulator-to-carrier frequency ratio are obtained.


Author(s):  
Hanna Sundari ◽  
Rina Husnaini Febriyanti

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical development particularly for second language writing of an eight-year old child who has experienced immersion abroad for one year in L2-speaking country. The participant is an eight-year old child from Jakarta Indonesia who has experienced immersion environment in Australia for one year. The research will be carried out qualitative naturalistic research design. Not less than 38 documents of participant’s paperwork during her school year were then collected, grouped and analysed. From the findings, it is known that morphological processes on L2 such as affixes and verb changes have emerged. Meanwhile, the findings also show the development on morphemic, phrasal and sentential level on acquiring L2. Some morphemes have been acquired such as the suffix, the changing of verb, the -ing form. Moreover, post-noun prepositional phrases are the most emerged phrases. On sentential level, active declarative sentences are the most frequently appeared. However, some errors and inconsistency also occur indicating the development of her second language.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-16
Author(s):  
Amirah Jazimah Sabjan

Abstract This study put its interest in investigating parental reading beliefs and children’s reading performance. It also sought to determine whether there is an association between parental reading beliefs and children’s reading performance. This research employed a quantitative research design and it used a quota sampling technique to select the respondents. A total of 30 parents from Sekolah Kebangsaan Sungai Pusu Kuala Lumpur answered a questionnaire about parental reading beliefs. The questionnaire used was adapted from a study by DeBaryshe and Binder (1994). In order to measure the children’s reading performance, the parents were asked to state their children’s comprehension marks towards the end of the questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of five factors related to parental reading beliefs which were teaching efficacy, positive attitude, verbal participation, reading instruction and basic knowledge. The data collected was analysed using Pearson Correlation. The results showed that all the factors under parental reading beliefs had positive relationship with children’s reading performance except for one factor which was reading instruction. All of them were not significant and as this study was a preliminary study, hence the results should not be generalised due to number of reasons. Keywords: Parents, reading beliefs, reading performance, primary school, quantitative research


2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (45) ◽  
pp. E6233-E6242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith B. Doelling ◽  
David Poeppel

Recent studies establish that cortical oscillations track naturalistic speech in a remarkably faithful way. Here, we test whether such neural activity, particularly low-frequency (<8 Hz; delta–theta) oscillations, similarly entrain to music and whether experience modifies such a cortical phenomenon. Music of varying tempi was used to test entrainment at different rates. In three magnetoencephalography experiments, we recorded from nonmusicians, as well as musicians with varying years of experience. Recordings from nonmusicians demonstrate cortical entrainment that tracks musical stimuli over a typical range of tempi, but not at tempi below 1 note per second. Importantly, the observed entrainment correlates with performance on a concurrent pitch-related behavioral task. In contrast, the data from musicians show that entrainment is enhanced by years of musical training, at all presented tempi. This suggests a bidirectional relationship between behavior and cortical entrainment, a phenomenon that has not previously been reported. Additional analyses focus on responses in the beta range (∼15–30 Hz)—often linked to delta activity in the context of temporal predictions. Our findings provide evidence that the role of beta in temporal predictions scales to the complex hierarchical rhythms in natural music and enhances processing of musical content. This study builds on important findings on brainstem plasticity and represents a compelling demonstration that cortical neural entrainment is tightly coupled to both musical training and task performance, further supporting a role for cortical oscillatory activity in music perception and cognition.


1998 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Vaughn ◽  
Sally Watson Moody ◽  
Jeanne Shay Schumm

Reading instruction and grouping practices provided for students with learning disabilities (LD) by special education teachers in the resource room were examined. Fourteen special education teachers representing 13 schools were observed three times over the course of 1 year and interviewed in the beginning and end of the school year. Results indicated that teachers primarily provided whole group reading instruction to relatively large groups of students (5 to 19), and little differentiated instruction or materials were provided despite the wide range (3 to 5 grade levels) of reading abilities represented. Most teachers identified whole language as their primary approach to reading, and little instruction that addressed word recognition or comprehension was observed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-49
Author(s):  
Egor Palkin ◽  
Rustam Mullyadzhanov

Flows between two closely spaced bounding surfaces are frequently appear in engineering applications and natural flows. In current paper the flow over a cylinder in a narrow rectangular duct was investigated by numerical computations of Navier-Stokes equations using Large eddy simulations (LES) at ReD = 3 750 based on cylinder diameter and the bulk velocity at inflow boundary. The influence of the bounding walls was demonstrated by comparing mean flow streamlines with the flow over an infinite cylinder at close Reynolds numbers. A comparison between the time-averaged velocity field in front and past the cylinder with experimental from the literature data showed good agreement although the characteristic horseshoe vortex structures are highly sensitive to Reynolds number and turbulence level at inflow boundary. Most energetic modes in recirculating region were revealed by spectral analysis. These low-frequency modulations were characterized by the pair of dominating vortices which are expected to have high influence on the heat transfer in near wake of the cylinder.


2020 ◽  
Vol 223 (21) ◽  
pp. jeb232637
Author(s):  
Jiangyan Shen ◽  
Ke Fang ◽  
Ping Liu ◽  
Yanzhu Fan ◽  
Jing Yang ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTVisual lateralization is widespread for prey and anti-predation in numerous taxa. However, it is still unknown how the brain governs this asymmetry. In this study, we conducted behavioral and electrophysiological experiments to evaluate anti-predatory behaviors and dynamic brain activities in Emei music frogs (Nidirana daunchina), to explore the potential eye bias for anti-predation and the underlying neural mechanisms. To do this, predator stimuli (a model snake head and a leaf as a control) were moved around the subjects in clockwise and anti-clockwise directions at steady velocity. We counted the number of anti-predatory responses and measured electroencephalogram (EEG) power spectra for each band and brain area (telencephalon, diencephalon and mesencephalon). Our results showed that (1) no significant eye preferences could be found for the control (leaf); however, the laterality index was significantly lower than zero when the predator stimulus was moved anti-clockwise, suggesting that left-eye advantage exists in this species for anti-predation; (2) compared with no stimulus in the visual field, the power spectra of delta and alpha bands were significantly greater when the predator stimulus was moved into the left visual field anti-clockwise; and, (3) generally, the power spectra of each band in the right-hemisphere for the left visual field were higher than those in the left counterpart. These results support that the left eye mediates the monitoring of a predator in music frogs and lower-frequency EEG oscillations govern this visual lateralization.


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