Guest Lectures Flashcards
Which is correct?
Dylsexia is characterized by:
A) Poor decoding abilities
B) Difficulty with paying attention
D) Mental deficiencies due to lack of comprehension
E) Difficulty recognizing and manipulating affect in words
A) Poor decoding abilities
What are some characteristics of dyslexia?
It has a neurobiological origin and often urns in families, but environmental factors might also contribute to it (40%). Dyslexia is independent of intelligence, education or socisocio-economic status. It can, however, result in significant educational and occupational disadvantages throughout the person’s lifespan. It affects 5- 15% of the world’s population, which equates to around 700 million people worldwide (International Dyslexia Association, 2017)
What does the phonological theory of dyslexia state?
According to the phonological theory, the primary deficit in dyslexia is phonological awareness = the ability to perceive and manipulate single linguistic unit sounds (phonemes).
Research shows different possible core deficits of dyslexia. These are…
Issues with phonological awareness
Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) - often used in screening, you have 5-6 common objects and they have to name them very quickly, they can do it but it’s much slower than their peers
Shor-term working memory deficits
What are some linguistic difficulties specific to dyslexia?
- Delayed morphosyntactic skills, vocabulary learning is slower, problems with syntax and morphosyntaxtic agreement (Across age groups and cross-linguistically);
- Slower in reacting to spoken sentence production task and producing less fluent grammatical and complete sentences than controls;
- spelling difficulties (e.g. adding, omitting, substituting letters),
difficulties in segmenting morpholgically complex words (breaking the word into base and affix, e.g. singer - sing + er; which consequently leads to difficulties in understanding the compositional meaning); - poor morpholgoical or phonological awareness can lead to poor text comprehension for people with dyslexia, since novel words cannot be retrieved form a mental lexicon
A person has the following symptoms. Which condition are they likely afflicted with?
* Slow and inaccurate word recognition
* Poor decoding abilities
* Difficulty recognizing and manipulating different sounds in words
* Problems with spelling
* Reading difficulties, which can impede vocabulary growth
* Problems in reading comprehension
* Delayed morphosyntactic skills, vocabulary learning is slower, problems with syntax and morphosyntaxtic agreement
Developmental dylsexia.
Explain Coltheart’s Dual Route model in the context of dyslexia.
A theoretical model of reading which involves a system of processing modules that support two different paths.
Lexical route: readers recognise known words by sight alone, by accessing their mental lexicon; whole-word recognition, for irregular spellings that don’t follow letter-to-sound rules (queue, colonel) → not really a problem for Slovene because it is so transparent
Sublexical route: the reader uses a set of translation rules to convert written graphemes into spoken phonemes → less proficient readers, for nonwords/pseudowords, cannot be used for irregular spellings
How are the brains of people with dyslexia different from a neurotypical brain?
When we look at people with dyslexia there are patterns of insufficient activation and of over-activation. The brains of individuals with dyslexia are marked with over activation of Broca’s area. Several functional imaging studies with dyslexic participants found abnormalities in left hemisphere language network associated with reading. Results consistent with under-activations have been reported in two posterior left hemisphere regions. A dorsal temporoparietal region, which is thought to be crucial for phonological processing and phoneme-grapheme conversion (sublexical route), a ventral, occipitotemporal region, which has lexico-semantic function and includes the so-called visual word form area, which is thought to participate in whole word recognition (lexical).
What are some intervention strategies to alleviate symptoms of dyslexia?
- Phonemic, ortographic and morphological training (identifying and segmenting roots and affixes; teaching them how to parse different words)
- Neuromodulatory intervention techniques (TMAS)
What are offline behavioural methods? What about online?
Offline: Looking at the outcome of language processing after the stimulus has been processed (looking at the final decision); we can’t tell apart different stages of processing
Online: Looking at language behaviour that is a result of brain operations while it is happening, we can tell apart different processing stages; examples self-paced reading. Some read sentence word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by stance. No task, but the participants decide when to present the next word. This tells us how tasking a word or phrase is even before the entire sentence is processed and integrated. The smaller the chunk, the more natural reading is. You have ‘non-cumulative’ (the….cat….sat…; ‘cat’ would appear, ‘the’ would disappear), cumulative (things stay on screen, the … the cat …. The cat sat.).
Quick, ballistic movements our eyes make are called —————
saccades
What is perceptual span in reading?
The size of the effective visual field from which information is extracted (when you fixate, how much can you perceive; this is something that is trained because it actually depends on your language system and proficiency)
More proficient people can have a larger effective visual field
Cross-linguistic variation: English (3-4 character spaces to left, 14-15 to the right); Chinese (1 character to the left, 2-3 to right); Hebrew, the perceptual span is larger to the left than to the right (because the reading direction is right-left)
Subject to stimuli characteristics (font, color…)
What influences saccades?
Text difficulty, type of task (skimming vs. comprehension task), natural variability, word frequency, ambiguity, semantic relation, familiarity, age of acquisition, word length, …
In eye-tracking experiments, longer fixations and regressions indicate —————- processing cost. These longer fixations are also called ————————— ——————–.
In eye-tracking experiments, longer fixations and regressions indicate more processing cost. These longer fixations are also called backward saccades
The visual world paradigm today consists of a family of experimental methods in which participants eye movements to objects are measured while they listen to spoken language related to the content of the visual display. Name some versions within this family :)
Task or action-based design
Participants click or more the target object to a different position following instructions (spoken) e.g. ‘’pick up the beaker; now put it below the diamond’’.
Look and listen design
Participants listen to utterances while looking at the workspace displayed on screen (you see where they fixate)
Speech production
The participants are asked to name sets of objects in a fixed order, for example (you measure fixation and how long they take to produce).
Based on stimuli:
Images; A grid containing the target image (and other images)
See for more: Tenenhaus et. al (1995), integration fo visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension
