0000000000311688
AUTHOR
Kenneth R. Pugh
Brain event-related potentials to phoneme contrasts and their correlation to reading skills in school-age children
Development of reading skills has been shown to be tightly linked to phonological processing skills and to some extent to speech perception abilities. Although speech perception is also known to play a role in reading development, it is not clear which processes underlie this connection. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated the speech processing mechanisms for common and uncommon sound contrasts (/ba/-/da/-/ga/ and /ata/-/at: a/) with respect to the native language of school-age children in Finland and the US. In addition, a comprehensive behavioral test battery of reading and phonological processing was administered. ERPs revealed that the children could discriminate betw…
Challenges Associated with Reading Acquisition in Sub-Saharan Africa : Promotion of Literacy in Multilingual Contexts
Heikki Lyytinen and his co-authors note the problems of poorly trained teachers and large class sizes in Africa. Drawing on experience in Zambia, they present a case study of a digital game that can help overcome these problems and lead to more effective literacy instruction, particularly for students facing barriers to learning how to read. peerReviewed
Spatial Properties of Mismatch Negativity in Patients with Disorders of Consciousness
In recent decades, event-related potentials have been used for the clinical electrophysiological assessment of patients with disorders of consciousness (DOCs). In this paper, an oddball paradigm with two types of frequencydeviant stimulus (standard stimuli were pure tones of 1000 Hz; small deviant stimuli were pure tones of 1050 Hz; large deviant stimuli were pure tones of 1200 Hz) was applied to elicit mismatch negativity (MMN) in 30 patients with DOCs diagnosed using the JFK Coma Recovery ScaleRevised (CRS-R). The results showed that the peak amplitudes of MMN elicited by both large and small deviant stimuli were significantly different from baseline. In terms of the spatial properties of…
Supporting Acquisition of Spelling Skills in Different Orthographies Using an Empirically Validated Digital Learning Environment
This paper discusses how the association learning principle works for supporting acquisition of basic spelling and reading skills using digital game-based learning environment with the Finland-based GraphoLearn (GL) technology. This program has been designed and validated to work with early readers of different alphabetic writing systems using repetition and reinforcing connections between spoken and written units. Initially GL was developed and found effective in training children at risk of reading disorders in Finland. Today GL training has been shown to support learning decoding skills among children independent of whether they face difficulties resulting from educational, social, or bi…