Tallahassee, Fla. -- 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. The center, which will be one of only four in the nation, represents the NIH's flagship research program for learning disabilities.
Dyslexia is a learning disorder marked by impairment of the ability to recognize and comprehend written words. Although once thought of as visual disorder, scientists now know that the condition's manifestations -- misspellings, reversing letters and words, even writing backwards -- spring from an inability to recognize sounds, not visual cues.
"Many kids with reading disabilities really aren't identified until the second grade," said Richard K. Wagner, FSU's Alfred Binet Professor of Psychology and a Distinguished Professor of Psychology. As the principal investigator for the NIH grant, he will oversee the work of the Multidisciplinary Learning Disabilities Center.
The center will enable FSU researchers to conduct behavioral and genetic studies involving thousands of Florida children with dyslexia. The center will be an arm of FSU's Florida Center for Reading Research (www.fcrr.org), which was itself established in 2002 as a cornerstone of Gov. Jeb Bush's "Just Read, Florida!" initiative to have all schoolchildren in the state reading at their grade level by the year 2012.
"Our hope is to develop ways of diagnosing dyslexia and other learning disabilities at a younger age so that these children have greater chances of leading a happy, productive and successful life," Wagner said. "And it's a phenomenal opportunity for FSU because we will get to parti
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Contact: Richard K. Wagner
rkwagner@psy.fsu.edu
850-644-1033
Florida State University
11-Jul-2006