One portion of the study involved asking children if two letters of the alphabet rhymed, while their brains were imaged with fMRI scans. The scans of the 20 dyslexic children in the experiment who struggled with the task contrasted sharply with those of the 12 normal readers in the experiment's control group. The dyslexics' scans showed a lack of activity in the language-critical temporal regions of the brain.
The training program, which included dyslexic children aged 8 to 12 years, was designed to help them learn to process and interpret the very rapid sequence of sounds within words and sentences by exaggerating them and slowing them down.
"These are the building blocks you have to have in place before you can learn to read," Tallal said. "I think Fast ForWord is building the scaffolding for reading, and doing it based on scientific knowledge of the most efficient and effective way of helping the brain learn."
The dyslexic children used the Fast ForWord Language computer program for 100 minutes a day, five days a week, as part of their regular school day. The program consisted of seven exercises adapted as computer games. In one exercise, for example, when a picture of a boy and a toy was shown, a voice from the computer asked the player to point to the boy a step that required understanding the very brief difference in the sound of each word's first consonant.
"Each child worked at his or her own level," Tallal said. The goal was to have the children process sounds correctly in words and sentences of increasing length and grammatical complexity, she added. The st
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Contact: Michael Sutton
msutton@andromeda.rutgers.edu
973-353-5262
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
4-Mar-2003