Category: Dyslexia

Using new software developed to investigate how the brains of dyslexic children are organized, University of Washington researchers have found that key areas for language and working memory involved in reading are connected differently in dyslexics than in children who are good readers and spellers.

The New York Branch of The International Dyslexia Association will be holding its 34th Annual conference on Dyslexia & Related Learning Disabilities titled Closing The Gap Between Research and Practice on Monday, March 12 & Tuesday, March 13, 2007 at the Marriott Marquis, New York, New York. The two day conference offers 107 sessions and 60 exhibitors.

“Time” is the most popular noun in the English language, yet how would we tell time if we didn’t have access to the plethora of watches, clocks and cell phones at our disposal?For decades, scientists have believed that the brain possesses an internal clock that allows it to keep track of time. Now a UCLA study in the Feb. 1 edition of Neuron proposes a new model in which a series of physical changes to the brain’s cells helps the organ to monitor the passage of time.

The dyslexic brain struggles to read because even small distractions can throw it off, according to a new model of dyslexia emerging from a group of recent studies.The studies contradict an influential, 30-year-old theory that blamed dyslexia on a neural deficit in processing the fast sounds of language.Instead, the studies suggest that children with dyslexia have bad filters for irrelevant data.

If you’ve ever wondered how you recognize your mother’s voice without seeing her face or how you discern your cell phone’s ring in a crowded room, researchers may have another piece of the answer.Their work indicates that once you figure out your mother’s voice is a good thing - most days - fairly significant changes occur in the sensory cortex, the part of the brain that responds to sound.

Florida State University has been awarded a $6-million grant from the federal government over five years to fund research efforts aimed at more effectively understanding, predicting and preventing the development of learning disabilities such as dyslexia in children, it was announced today.The grant will fund the creation of a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Multidisciplinary Learning Disabilities Center at FSU.

Brain images of children with dyslexia taken before they received spelling instruction show that they have different patterns of neural activity than do good spellers when doing language tasks related to spelling. But after specialized treatment emphasizing the letters in words, they showed similar patterns of brain activity.

About five million Germans have serious learning difficulties when it comes to reading and writing. It is frequently the case that several members of the same family are affected. So hereditary disposition seems to play an important role in the occurrence of dyslexia. Scientists at the universities of Marburg, Würzburg and Bonn have been working on this question together with Swedish colleagues from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

Pediatric researchers at Yale School of Medicine have identified a gene on human chromosome 6 called DCDC2, which is linked to dyslexia, a reading disability affecting millions of children and adults. The researchers also found that a genetic alteration in DCDC2 leads to a disruption in the formation of brain circuits that make it possible to read. This genetic alteration is transmitted within families.

The dyslexic brain may have a general problem forming perceptual categories, including the templates for printed letters and speech sounds, say USC neuroscientists. This is reflected in a reduced ability to filter out visual “noise” that can obscure a pattern, the researchers suggest.