flynn002

A couple of years ago I did a Google search for ‘Specific language impairment’. I was  appalled by what I found. The top hit was a video by a chiropractor who explained he’d read a paper about neurological basis of language difficulties; he proceeded to mangle its contents, concluding that cranial osteopathy would help affected children. I’ve previously described how I got together with colleagues in 2012 to try and remedy this situation, culminating in a campaign for Raising Awareness of Language Learning Impairments (RALLI). The practicalities have sometimes been challenging but I’m pleased to say that the collection of videos on our RALLI site has now attracted over 90,000 hits, providing an accessible and evidence-based source of information about developmental language impairments. As well as research-based films we have videos with practical information for parents, children and teachers. So here, for those of you interested in this topic, is an index of what we have so far:...

© www.CartoonStock.com When I was starting out on a doctorate, I’d look at the senior people in my field and wonder if I’d ever be like them. It must be great, I thought, to reach the advanced age of 40. By then you’d have learned everything you needed to know to do great science, and you could just focus on doing it. I suspect today’s crop of grad students are a bit more savvy than I was, but all the same, I wonder if they realise just how wrong that picture is – for two reasons. First, you never stop learning. The field moves on. Instead of getting easier, it gets harder. I remember when techniques such as functional brain imaging first came along. The most competent people in that area were either those who had developed the methods, or young people who learned them as grad students. If you were of the generation above, you had three choices: ignore the methods, spend time learning them, or hire junior people who knew what they were doing. As the methods evolve, they get ever more c...

Portraits of Serafino & Francesco Falzacappa; Pier Leone Ghezzi [1674 - 1755] Source: J. Paul Getty Museum Our children are being exposed to an experience that alters their brains in ways we do not fully understand. There is now strong evidence that patterns of brain connectivity are different in individuals who have been exposed compared to those who have not 1 . Influential figures have expressed concern that people’s memories will be restricted by this experience, which removes the need for them to memorise material, and allows them to look things up instead 2 . And indeed, there is clear evidence of changes in cognitive processing, as predicted 3 . Furthermore, instead of learning in a social context, our children are increasingly being encouraged to engage in solitary activities that deprive them from the benefits of interacting with other people. And, rather than embracing traditional influences, they are exposed to alien ideas from other cultures 4,5   Does this sound fa...

The arcuate fasciculus is a white matter tract linking areas in the temporal lobe involved in interpreting speech with areas in the frontal lobe that control motor movements. Its role in language was established years ago when it was proposed that conduction aphasia, characterised by poor repetition despite good understanding and fluent spontaneous speech, was a disconnection syndrome resulting from lesions of the arcuate fasciculus. Compared with apes and monkeys, humans have much stronger structural connections between temporal and frontal regions of the brain, suggesting that evolution of the arcuate fasciculus played a key role in language evolution . Study of white matter tracts in the brain has advanced rapidly since the advent of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). DTI makes it possible to measure parameters such as fractional anisotropy and radial diffusivity, indirect measures of myelination and/or axonal density within white matter. Use of DTI has revealed an intriguing aspect ...

There has been a chorus of disapproval this week at the suggestion that researchers should 'pre-register' their studies with journals and spell out in advance the methods and analyses that they plan to do. Those who wish to follow the debate should look at this critique by Sophie Scott, with associated comments , and the responses to it collated here by Pete Etchells. They should also read the explanation of the pre-registration proposals and FAQ   by Chris Chambers - something that many participants in the debate appear not to have done. Quite simply, pre-registration is designed to tackle two problems in scientific publishing: Bias against publication of null results A failure to distinguish hypothesis-generating (exploratory) from hypothesis-testing analyses Either of these alone is bad for science: the combined effect of both of them is catastrophic, and has led to a situation where research is failing to do its job in terms of providing credible answers to scientific q...

Pompeii mosaic Plato conversing with his students As time goes by, I am increasingly unable to enjoy big conferences. I'm not sure how much it's a change in me or a change in conferences, but my attention span shrivels after the first few talks. I don't think I'm alone. Look around any conference hall and everywhere you'll see people checking their email or texting. I usually end up thinking I'd be better off staying at home and just reading stuff. All this made me start to wonder, what is the point of conferences?  Interaction should be the key thing that a conference can deliver. I have in the past worked in small departments, grotting away on my own without a single colleague who is interested in what I'm doing. In that situation, a conference can reinvigorate your interest in the field, by providing contact with like-minded people who share your particular obsession. And for early-career academics, it can be fascinating to see the big names in action. Fo...