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There’s no doubt that getting tipsy while pregnant is a seriously bad idea. Alcohol is a toxin that can pass through the placenta to the foetus and cause damage to the developing brain.  For women who are regular heavy drinkers or binge drinkers, there is a risk that the child will develop foetal alcohol syndrome , a condition that affects physical development and is associated with learning difficulties. But what of more moderate drinking? The advice is conflicting. Many doctors take the view that alcohol is never going to be good for the developing foetus and they recommend complete abstention during pregnancy as a precautionary measure. Others have argued, though, that this advice is too extreme, and that moderate drinking does not pose any risk to the child. Last week a paper by Lewis et al was published in PLOS One providing evidence on this issue, and concluding that moderate drinking does pose a risk and should be avoided. The methodology of the paper was complex and it’s ...

I just love the fact that the BBC have a Democracy Live channel where you can watch important government business. The Public Accounts Committee may sound incredibly dull, but I found this footage riveting. The committee grills executives from Starbucks, Amazon and Google about their tax arrangements. Quite apart from the content, it provides a wealth of material for anyone interested in how we interpret body language as a cue to a person's honesty. But for me it raised a serious issue about Starbucks. Is it run by aliens?

Early in October a weird story hit the media: a nation’s chocolate consumption is predictive of its number of Nobel prize-winners, after correcting for population size. This is the kind of kooky statistic that journalists  love, and the story made a splash. But was it serious? Most academics initially assumed not. The source of the story was the New England Journal of Medicine , an august publication with stringent standards, which triages a high proportion of submissions that don’t get sent out for review. (And don't try asking for an explanation of why you’ve been triaged). It seemed unlikely that a journal with such exacting standards would give space to a lightweight piece on chocolate. So the first thought was that the piece had been published to make a point about the dangers of assuming causation from correlation, or the inaccuracies that can result when a geographical region is used as the unit of analysis. But reading the article more carefully gave one pause. It did have...

Photo credit: Ben Earwicker, Garrison Photography, Boise, ID www.garrisonphoto.org A remarkable schism is developing between audiologists in the UK and the USA on the topic of auditory processing disorder (APD) in children. In 2010, the American Academy of Audiology published clinical practice guidelines for auditory processing disorder .  In 2011, the British Society of Audiology published a position statement on the same topic, which came to rather different conclusions. This month a White Paper by the British Society of Audiology appeared reaffirming their position alongside invited commentaries. So what is all the fuss about? The argument centres on how to diagnose APD in children. Most of the tests used in the USA to identify APD involve responding to speech. One of the most widely-used assessments is the SCAN-C battery which has four subtests: Filtered words: Repeat words that have been low-pass filtered, so they sound muffled Auditory figure-ground: Repeat words that are p...

The new phonics screening test for children has been highly controversial.   I’ve been surprised at the amount of hostility engendered by the idea of testing children’s knowledge of how letters and sounds go together. There’s plenty of evidence that this is a foundational skill for reading, and poor ability to do phonics is a good predictor of later reading problems. So while I can see there are aspects of the implementation of the phonics screen that could be improved,   I don’t buy arguments that it will ‘confuse’ children, or prevent them reading for meaning. I discovered today that some early data on the phonics screen had recently been published by the Department for Education , and my inner nerd was immediately stimulated to visit the website and download the tables.   What I found was both surprising and disturbing. Most of the results are presented in terms of proportions of children ‘passing’ the screen, i.e. scoring 32 or more. There are tables showing how ...

  © Cartoonstock.com Noam Chomsky is widely regarded as an intellectual giant, responsible for a revolution in how people think about language.   In a recent book by Chomsky and James McGilvray, the Science of Language, the foreword   states : “It is particularly important to understand Chomsky’s views … not only because he virtually created the modern science of language by himself …. but because of what he and colleagues have discovered about language – particularly in recent years…”   As someone who works on child language disorders, I have tried many times to read Chomsky in order to appreciate the insights that he is so often credited with. I regret to say that, over the years, I have come to the conclusion that, far from enhancing our understanding of language acquisition, his ideas have led to stagnation, as linguists have gone through increasingly uncomfortable contortions to relate facts about children’s language to his theories. The problem is that the th...