Dyslexia Learners Dramatically Improve Reading Skills with Fast ForWord
Hello my name is Barbara Calhoun and today I will review the findings of a study done by Nadine Gaabs and her colleagues. This study was published in restorative neurology and neuroscience in 2007.
Introduction
Studies have shown that in adults with developmental dyslexia, there is a disruption of the left prefrontal cortex response to short sounds. This is important since speech is made up of numerous short sounds in a person’s mastery of the settled sounds of the spoken language as related to the reading ability. In this study the researchers wanted to extend those findings to children. They did this by investigating which regions of the children’s brains were active in response to rapid auditory stimuli determining, whether the activation patterns were similar in children with dyslexia and children with typically developing reading skills, determining whether these differences could be remediated and determining whether the remediation also resulted in changes in language and in reading skills
Methodology
45 children took part in the study; the average age was 10 ½
22 had developmental dyslexia and 23 had typically developing reading skills. All the students were behaviorally and physiologically assessed. Some students used the Fast ForWord language product an intensive intervention that builds rapid auditory processing, phonological and linguistic skills.
Intervention
Fast ForWord language is an intensive computerized product that uses sounds and processed language to help built students foundational language skills including their auditory processing skills, their memory, their attention, and their sequencing. The version of the product that was used did not include any orthographic stimulate. There was no text. It was all sounds and pictures. The students used the Fast ForWord language product for 100 minutes a day, 5 days a week for 8 weeks.
Assessments
The behavioral tests evaluated students early reading skills and reading achievement. They were the: –
- Comprehensive test of phonological processing (CTOPP)
- The Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF)
- Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (WRMT)
These tests evaluated student’s ability to manipulate the sounds in languages, such as adding a ‘s’ to ‘cat’ to get ‘cats’. As well as the ability to use language in general, and the ability to read and understand words, sentences, and paragraphs. In addition to behavioral tests, FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) was used to measure students brain activity when they were doing a task unrelated to reading and language. They were listening to sounds that changed frequency. Like a whistle.
Pre-tests showed that the students with dyslexia had reading skills that were significantly below the reading scores of their typically developing peers.
In this figure from their study, highlighted areas are regions that were more active to sounds and had passed changes in frequency than to sounds that had slow changes in frequency. In the typically developing reader, there are several regions were there was a difference. In the children with developmental dyslexia there were no differences between the cortical responses to fast and slow changes in frequency.
Improved Behavioral Measures
After using the Fast ForWord language product, students reading and language skills were re-evaluated. The students had made improvements in sight word reading and passage comprehension as well as their total language skills and phonological awareness. These improvements were statistically significant.
Altered Cortical Activity
In addition, Cortical activity was re-evaluated. On the left, we are reminded that children with dyslexia, there are no regions where they have significant differences between cortical responses to fast transitions and cortical responses to slow transitions.
The figure on the right shows several regions where the differences in activation increased after remediation. More similar to the activation patterns of children with typical development. A particular interest is the left prefrontal region, an area that has been repeatedly shown to have different processing in children with dyslexia. The results of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that deficit in auditory processing can compromise the ability to process rapid changes in frequency such as those that occur within phonemes. And that this impairment can lead to a deficit in the phonological processing of oral language, which in turn lead to reading impairment. This results also show that the neural circuitry of children with developmental dyslexia is plastic. It can be changed. Effective remediation can be accomplished by focusing on improving on rapid auditory processing and oral language skills and results improve to reading and language skills as well as increased brain activity in response to rapidly changing sounds.
Thank you for joining us, if you have any question please refer to the study or contact our customer service team.