Dr. Ken Pugh

Neuroimaging studies of reading and language development: An update on recent findings

CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series - Presentation by Dr. Ken Pugh

Friday, November 7, 2008 at 1:30 pm -3:00 pm
Room 1034, McIntyre Medical Building

Dr. Ken Pugh is President and Director of Research, Senior Scientist, at Haskins Laboratories, in New Haven, Connecticut

Abstract

Our research combines several types of neuroimaging technologies with intensive behavioral testing in order to examine developmental trajectories for language and reading in both reading disabled (RD) and non-impaired (NI) cohorts. In studies of both adults and children, RD readers demonstrate anomalous brain activation patterns at posterior regions in the left hemisphere (LH) during tasks that make explicit demands on phonological processing, along with, what appears to be, a compensatory reliance on frontal lobe sites and right hemisphere systems. Brain/behavior analyses have indicated that the development of reading fluency in young children is strongly associated with the development of the left hemisphere posterior reading system.

Our new longitudinal project is aimed at establishing key neuro-chemical and genetic factors associated with atypical brain/behavior trajectories; initial findings will be discussed. With regard to plasticity and learning, intervention studies have examined the influence of intensive phonological remediation in young at-risk children, revealing substantial gains in both reading scores and development of these LH reading systems for children afforded this treatment. Recent extensions of our learning research with older RD readers continue to suggest a high degree of plasticity in this population.

Drs. Jan Edwards and Benjamin Munson

Phonological development by children with typical and atypical speech-sound development: The acquisition (or not) of a (really) complex system

CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series - Joint presentation by Drs. Jan Edwards and Benjamin Munson

Friday, October 24, 2008 at 1:00 pm -3:00 pm
Room 500, Cancer Pavilion, Life Sciences Complex 1160 av des Pins ouest

Dr. Jan Edwards is a research scientist and Professor of Communicative Disorders at the Waisman Centre, UW-Madison. Dr. Benjamin Munson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

Abstract

In the first few years of life, most children learn to talk, whether they are learning to speak English, or Korean, or both, and whether they live in a middle class American English home where mothers engage in intense interaction with the children using a special emphatic speech style that stresses nouns and labeling, or in a Korean home, where the analogous infant-directed speech style instead emphasizes verbs and the actions that verbs name. Perhaps because of this rapid development, the traditional view of phonological development has posited that developmental changes in productions patterns is the result of a largely automatic and autonomous process in which children move from a relatively universal phonological constraints to ones tailored to the ambient language.

Such a view of phonological development makes many assumptions: for example, it assumes that children’s phonological learning is best described in terms of alphabetic transcription and that patterns of phonological development are similar across different languages. It also predicts that phonological disorders can be best characterized by deficits in abstract phonological knowledge. In this talk, we will present analyses of data from two projects in support of a more nuanced view of phonological development. The first of these is from the paidologos project (ling.osu.edu…). The paidologos project is a cross-linguistic examination of first-language phonological development across a number of languages, including American English, Cantonese, Greek, Japanese, and Mandarin. The second is a project that examined phonological knowledge deficits in children with phonological disorders. Throughout the talk, we will argue that phonological knowledge is a complex system that involves many different levels of representation. The child’s task, as a language learner, is to learn these different levels and the mappings among them. Moreover, deficits in each of these types of knowledge lead to qualitatively different speech and language impairments. [Supported by NIDCD grant R01 DC02932 and NSF grant BCS-0729140 to Jan Edwards, and by NIDCD Grant R03 DC005702 and NSF grant BCS- 0729277 to Benjamin Munson]

Round 2 Travel Awards

Congratulations to the following CRLMB student members who were chosen to receive Round 2 Travel Awards from the Centre:

• A. Marquis
• T. Skinner
• J. Loehr
• D. Fogle
• P. Tremblay

All students are requested (and required) to acknowledge the support of the Centre by including our logo on your poster or presentation. Within 10 days of your return from the conference, please complete the student expense reimbursement form, and send it, with original receipts, to:

Lisa Coady
CRLMB - Rabinovitch House
McGill University
3640 rue de la Montagne
Montreal, QC H3G 2A8

Please note that only one expense report can be filed (by McGill students) for any conference attended. Any recipient whose advisor will cover the balance of travel expenses, and who is unsure as to how the ER should be completed, is asked to call the Centre for instructions in advance of completing the report.

CRLMB 07/08 Annual Report

Our annual report is now available. (Download size: 2.3 MB)