flynn002

 Life and times of an amateur video-maker It’s been an exciting week. On Friday, a small group of us launched a campaign to raise awareness of children’s language learning impairments ( RALLI ). We’ve been fortunate to have had considerable help from TeamSpirit , an agency whose expertise in marketing and advertising has been invaluable. With their assistance, we’ve set up a YouTube channel, which has kicked off with some professionally-made video shorts to introduce the campaign. But we don’t have funds to continue with a lot of expensive professional services, and so our plan is to post a mix of content on the site, including some videos made by the RALLI team. We are four academics and a speech-and-language therapist, none of whom has any expertise in filming, but the TeamSpirit folks were reassuring. What we needed was a digital flipcam, which would allow us to film ourselves in high definition video, download to the computer, and upload to YouTube. Easy peasy. Or so I thought....

One of the great things about blogging is that it allows for communication to proceed far more rapidly than would be possible through conventional academic publications. In previous posts I’ve made a plea for MRI researchers to share data so that claims about the neurobiology of conditions such as dyslexia and autism can be replicated. After my last blogpost, I was contacted by Mark Eckert from the Medical University of South Carolina, one of the pioneers of MRI studies of dyslexia (e.g. Eckert et al, 2005). He tells me that a data-sharing project on dyslexia is already underway and asked if I would be able to share this information with my followers. I am of course delighted to do so! Here is some background from Mark: The structural neuroimaging literature on dyslexia and other complex disorders is filled with inconsistent results.  Meta-analysis provides a mechanism for identifying results that are common across studies, but direct analysis of the same datasets provides greater ...

Specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia are related developmental disorders in which a child has difficulty learning to talk (SLI) or to read (dyslexia). Many children have both problems, although they can occur separately ( Bishop & Snowling, 2004 ), and they are sometimes grouped together as ‘language learning impairments’. There's good evidence that genes are implicated in causing these conditions ( Bishop, 2009 ). A popular account maintains that the genes implicated in language learning impairments affect a very early process in the developing brain known as neuronal migration ( Galaburda et al., 2006 ). It’s an attractive theory that has the potential to provide a link from genes to behaviour. However, when I looked at the evidence, I found myself not entirely convinced. Here I’ll briefly review research on this topic, explain my reservations, and conclude by proposing a study that needs doing. I’m not an expert in neuroanatomy or neuroimaging, so I’ll be interest...