Comments on Reading and Word Recognition Research: Color and Object Naming Speed Predicts Future Risk...

I wonder if there is a connection to Vygotsky'...

2011-12-09T00:25:13.092-08:00

I wonder if there is a connection to Vygotsky's theory of labeling items with language in imaginative, cooperative play.

Here is a great article by George K. Georgiou, Rap...

2010-01-29T06:59:27.073-08:00

Here is a great article by George K. Georgiou, Rapid naming speed and reading across languages that vary in orthographic consistency that summarizes a great deal of research on naming speed as a predictor and as a diagnostic tool in languages other than English. Heinz Wimmer is another name to look up regarding cross-linguistic research on naming speed. Naming speed research in other languages is particularly powerful, because phonemic awareness deficits have less impact on children's outcomes in languages with transparent orthographies. The result are reading deficits almost exclusively in fluency (and then of course comprehension).

this are some interesting comments on the correlat...

2010-01-28T11:29:17.644-08:00

this are some interesting comments on the correlation between rapid automatized naming and identifying dyslexia. Do you have a reference to this article? (The only articles I found were the articles written by scientists in the 1990's.) I was looking up other articles that discussed this topic... there was one article discussing some of the work done by a Tufts University Psychology Maryanne Wolf, PhD.

The article quotes that "In fact, rapid-naming tasks appear to measure something separate from phoneme awareness, says Wolf. The measure itself correlates only weakly with phoneme awareness. Also, Wolf and others find that children with dyslexia can have problems with both phoneme-awareness tasks and rapid-naming tasks or with just one or the other task, indicating the two are mutually exclusive."

Its interesting because she isn't arguing that the correlation between RAN and phenome awareness isn't important, but I think the article discusses that this reveals only the "tip of the iceberg" and there are many other cognitive processes not accounted for.

Yet, many neuroscientists do research that do support the idea that RAN can help with identifying dyslexia at an early stage, so I guess perhaps its a matter of seeing what the research results produce.

Your first possible explanation has persuaded me t...

2010-01-27T20:56:16.493-08:00

Your first possible explanation has persuaded me the most so far (especially taking into consideration the mirror invariance paper). Regarding your second possible explanation, would it be helpful to follow up with the subjects years after to try to theorize attention deficit effects on this study? For example, if this data were to be collected years later, the study results of subjects later diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder could be compared with the study results of subjects later showing no attention deficit disorder symptoms.

Boy, it's a good thing I posted anonymously. L...

2010-01-27T09:42:35.993-08:00

Boy, it's a good thing I posted anonymously. Look at all those typos!But yes, that is what I was getting at. Are dyslexics impaired in their ability to connect the regions of the brain important to reading, but not impaired when the task demands connecting other regions of the brain?

Anonymous -- that's a really interesting idea....

2010-01-22T08:12:29.161-08:00

Anonymous -- that's a really interesting idea. Scene processing regions are further away from word processing regions, so it'd be interesting to see if scene naming is less good of a predictor.

Thank you, Livia for bringing up this important to...

2010-01-22T07:14:42.304-08:00

Thank you, Livia for bringing up this important topic in reading research. My comment focuses more on uses of the RAN. Many clinicians and neuropsychologists make the mistake of conceptulasing the RAN as an outcome measure. This means they expect to see change after intervention. In some children that is the case, but I think that has more to do with the inherent unreliability of testing children (my opinion). It is more accurate to conceive of the RAN as more like an intelligence test than as an outcome measure. It seems to describe a default behavior of the brains of slow namers when confronted with this type of visual stimuli. If that is true than Livia's explanation number one would seem to make a great of sense. It would be interesting to find out if you could devise a naming task that requires the subject to name some kind of stimuli that relies on other parts of the visual cortex.

Liz -- maybe you should have had the computer do s...

2010-01-20T11:18:07.598-08:00

Liz -- maybe you should have had the computer do some RAN tests :-)

From a practical or classroom point of view, havin...

2010-01-20T11:16:35.819-08:00

From a practical or classroom point of view, having a valid screening test for risk of later reading difficulties would be wonderful--normed to include children as young as 48 months.

Several years ago, I defragmented my dyslexic daug...

2010-01-20T11:14:32.790-08:00

Several years ago, I defragmented my dyslexic daughter's computer. It ran much faster. This caused my daughter to says she feel like her brain needs to be defragmented.

This suggests the word-form area is implicated.