flynn002

 Doing research, analysing the results, and writing it up is a prolonged and difficult process. Submitting the paper to a journal is an anxious moment. Of course, you hope the editor and reviewers will love it and thank you for giving them the opportunity to read your compelling research. And of course, that never happens. More often you get comments from reviewers pointing out the various inadequacies of your grasp of the literature, your experimental design and your reasoning, leading to further angst as you consider how to reply. But worse than this is silence. You hear nothing. You enquire. You are told that the journal is still seeking reviewers. If you go through that loop a few times, you start to feel like the Jane Austen heroine who, having dressed up in her finery for the ball, spends the evening being ignored by all the men, while other, superficial and gaudy women are snapped up as dance partners. There have been some downcast tweets in my timeline about papers getting ...

Source: http://www.weblogcartoons.com/2008/11/23/ideas/ Those of you who follow this blog may have noticed a lack of thematic coherence. I write about whatever is exercising my mind at the time, which can range from technical aspects of statistics to the design of bathroom taps. I decided it might be helpful to introduce a bit of order into this chaotic melange, so here is a catalogue of posts by topic. Language impairment, dyslexia and related disorders The common childhood disorders that have been left out in the cold (1 Dec 2010) What's in a name? (18 Dec 2010) Neuroprognosis in dyslexia (22 Dec 2010) Where commercial and clinical interests collide: Auditory processing disorder (6 Mar 2011) Auditory processing disorder (30 Mar 2011) Special educational needs: will they be met by the Green paper proposals? (9 Apr 2011) Is poor parenting really to blame for children's school problems? (3 Jun 2011) Early intervention: what's not to like? (1 Sep 2011) Lies, damned li...

There's been debate over the new terminology for Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) at a meeting (SRCLD) in the USA. I've not got any of the nuance here, but I feel I should make a quick comment on one issue I was specifically asked about, viz: As background: the field of children's language disorders has been a terminological minefield. The term Specific Language Impairment (SLI) began to be used widely in the 1980s as a diagnosis for children who had problems acquiring language for no apparent reason. One criterion for the diagnosis was that the child's language problems should be out of line with other aspects of development, and hence 'specific', and this was interpreted as requiring normal range nonverbal IQ (nviq). The term SLI was never adopted by the two main diagnostic systems -WHO's International Classification of Diseases (ICD) or the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), but the notion that IQ should ...