Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain PDF Download

Author: Maryanne Wolf
Publisher: Pro Ed
ISBN: 9781416400790
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
Scientists in the areas of cognition, clinical psychology, experimental psychology, and neuroscience investigate how the time it takes for the brain to process written language affects the development of reading.

Author: Zvia Breznitz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113563744X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
This is the first book to examine in-depth the crucial role of the speed of information processing in the brain in determining reading fluency in both normal and dyslexic readers. Part I explains fluency in reading from both traditional and modern perspectives. Fluency has historically been viewed as the outcome of other reading-related factors and has often been seen as a convenient measure of reading skills. This book, however, argues that fluency has a strong impact on other aspects of reading and plays a central role in the entire reading process. Part II deals with the determinants of reading fluency. Chief among these is the speed of information processing in the brain. Using both behavioral and electrophysiological evidence, the book systematically examines the features of processing speed in the various brain systems involved in reading: visual-orthographic, auditory-phonological, and semantic and shows how speed of processing affects fluency in reading. Part III deals with the complex issues of cross-modal integration and specifically with the need for effective synchronization of the brain processes involved in reading. It puts forward the Synchronization Hypothesis and discusses the role of the Asynchrony Phenomenon as a major factor in dyslexia. Finally, it summarizes research on manipulating reading rate by means of the Acceleration method, providing evidence for a possible intervention aimed at reducing Asynchrony. Key features of this outstanding new book include: *Expanded View of Fluency. Reading fluency is seen as both a dependent and an independent Variable. Currently available books focus on reading rate solely as the outcome of other factors whereas this volume stresses that it is both an outcome and a cause. *Information Processing Focus. Fluency itself is determined to a large extent by a more general factor, namely, speed of processing in the brain. The book presents wide-ranging evidence for individual differences in speed of processing across many subpopulations. *Brain Synchronization Focus. The book posits a new theory arguing that effective reading requires synchronization of the different brain systems: visual orthographic, auditory-phonological, and semantic. *Research-Based Interventions. Interventions to enhance fluency and, thereby, reading skills in general are presented in detail. *Author Expertise. Zvia Breznitz is Head of the Department of Learning Disabilities and Director of the Laboratory for Neurocognitive Research at Haifa University in Israel, where she has been researching this topic for over a decade. This book is appropriate for researchers and advanced students in reading, dyslexia, learning disabilities, cognitive psychology, and neuropsychology.

Author: Maryanne Wolf
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062388797
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The author of the acclaimed Proust and the Squid follows up with a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies. A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically with many concerned about both their own changes and that of children. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium. Drawing deeply on this research, this book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us—her beloved readers—to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums. Wolf raises difficult questions, including: Will children learn to incorporate the full range of "deep reading" processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain? Will the mix of a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention and their quick access to immediate, voluminous information alter their ability to think for themselves? With information at their fingertips, will the next generation learn to build their own storehouse of knowledge, which could impede the ability to make analogies and draw inferences from what they know? Will all these influences change the formation in children and the use in adults of "slower" cognitive processes like critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that comprise deep reading and that influence both how we think and how we live our lives? How can we preserve deep reading processes in future iterations of the reading brain? Concerns about attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology are never just about children—Wolf herself has found that, though she is a reading expert, her ability to read deeply has been impacted as she has become increasingly dependent on screens. Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities—and what this could mean for our future.

Author: Maryanne Wolf
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062010638
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
“Wolf restores our awe of the human brain—its adaptability, its creativity, and its ability to connect with other minds through a procession of silly squiggles.” — San Francisco Chronicle How do people learn to read and write—and how has the development of these skills transformed the brain and the world itself ? Neuropsychologist and child development expert Maryann Wolf answers these questions in this ambitious and provocative book that chronicles the remarkable journey of written language not only throughout our evolution but also over the course of a single child’s life, showing why a growing percentage have difficulty mastering these abilities. With fascinating down-to-earth examples and lively personal anecdotes, Wolf asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians is a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today’s technology-driven literacy, in which visual images on the screen are paving the way for a reduced need for written language—with potentially profound consequences for our future.

Author: Ludo Verhoeven
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108428770
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
The first truly systematic, multi-disciplinary, and cross-linguistic study of the language and writing system factors affecting the emergence of dyslexia.

Author: James Hinshelwood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description

Author: Sally E. Shaywitz
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 9780375400124
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Draws on recent scientific breakthroughs to explain the mechanisms underlying dyslexia, offering parents age-specific, grade-by-grade instructions on how to help their children.

Author: S. J. Ceci
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135877947
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
First Published in 1986. This is the companion volume to the Handbook of Cognitive, Social, and Neuropsychological Aspects of Learning Disabilities-Vol. 1. As such, it is a continuation of the theme and approach taken in the first volume. There are four thematic sections, comprised of three to four chapters each, dealing with cognitive (micro-level and macro-level), social, and neurological characteristics of learning-disabled individuals.

Author: Philip Schultz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393083500
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
“A success story . . . proof that one can rise above the disease and defy its so-called limitations on the brain.”—Daily Beast Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2008, Philip Schultz could never shake the feeling of being exiled to the "dummy class" in school, where he was largely ignored by his teachers and peers and not expected to succeed. Not until many years later, when his oldest son was diagnosed with dyslexia, did Schultz realize that he suffered from the same condition. In his moving memoir, Schultz traces his difficult childhood and his new understanding of his early years. In doing so, he shows how a boy who did not learn to read until he was eleven went on to become a prize-winning poet by sheer force of determination. His balancing act—life as a member of a family with not one but two dyslexics, countered by his intellectual and creative successes as a writer—reveals an inspiring story of the strengths of the human mind.

Author: Roderick Nicolson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262293129
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
A unique overview of research on dyslexia and an account of the underlying causes at cognitive, brain, and neural system levels that provides a framework for significant progress in the understanding of dyslexia and other related learning disabilities. Dyslexia research has made dramatic progress since the mid-1980s. Once discounted as a “middle-class myth,” dyslexia is now the subject of a complex—and confusing—body of theoretical and empirical research. In Dyslexia, Learning, and the Brain, leading dyslexia researchers Roderick Nicolson and Angela Fawcett provide a uniquely broad and coherent analysis of dyslexia theory. Unlike most dyslexia research, which addresses the question “what is the cause of the reading disability called dyslexia?” the authors' work has addressed the deeper question of “what is the cause of the learning disability that manifests as reading problems?” This perspective allows them to place dyslexia research within the much broader disciplines of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience and has led to a rich framework, including two established leading theories, the automatization deficit account (1990) and the cerebellar deficit hypothesis (2001). Nicolson and Fawcett show that extensive evidence has accumulated to support these two theories and that they may be seen as subsuming the established phonological deficit account and sensory processing accounts. Moving to the explanatory level of neural systems, they argue that all these disorders reflect problems in some component of the procedural learning system, a multiregion system including major components of cortical and subcortical regions. The authors' answer to the fundamental question “what is dyslexia?” offers a challenge and motivation for research throughout the learning disabilities, laying the foundations for future progress.