A Southern College of Optometry (Tennessee) study found the largest proportions of students to have converger or assimilator learning styles; more women than men were divergers. Substantial differences in men and women were found in hemispheric preference. Results suggest students with differing learning styles will perform differentially in…

An exploration of a popular model of bilingualism and bilingual behavior, based on Ervin and Osgood's (1954) survey of psycholinguistic theory and research, discusses misinterpretations, limits, and risks; natural and simulated bilingualism and complementary distribution of domains; and subordination and interference, compounding and fusion, and…

Kolb's Experiential Learning Model suggests that people differ in how they perceive and process information. Public agency training should incorporate knowledge of brain hemisphere dominance and learning style preferences in training design. (SK)

Discrimination and phonetic identification abilities of children (ages 5-6) with language impairments were compared to those of normally developing 4-year-olds and previous findings on children and adults. Results support hypotheses suggesting disorders in the phonological component of working memory in children with language impairments and the…

Contrary to dogma, the human brain does produce new nerve cells in adulthood. The mature human brain spawns neurons routinely in the hippocampus, an area important to memory and learning. This research can make it possible to ease any number of disorders involving neurological damage and death. (CCM)

Provides a general review and discussion of studies relating to hemispheric asymmetry in normal and reading disabled populations and possible implications with regard to the meaningfulness of IQ test results. Emphasizes research suggesting that the verbal factors of the WISC-III are related to the length of the left temporal bank of the planum…

Converging evidence from a number of neuroimaging studies suggest that fluent word identification in reading is related to the functional integrity of two left hemisphere posterior systems: a temporo-parietal system and a ventral occipito-temporal system. Readers with difficulties demonstrate heightened reliance on both inferior frontal and right…

This study examined the co-occurrence of both verbal and nonverbal deficits in adults with developmental language disorder (DLD). Comparison with adults without DLD revealed replicable differences between groups on both verbal and nonverbal tasks. Also, an association was found between performance on tests sensitive to facial affect and spatial…

Ingenious and seemingly powerful technologies have been developed recently that enable the visualization in some detail of events in the brain concomitant upon the ongoing behavioral performance of a human participant. Measurement of such brain events offers at the very least a new set of dependent variables in relation to which the independent…

A lateralized backward masking paradigm was used to examine hemisphere differences in orthographic and phonological processes at an early time course of word recognition. Targets (e.g., bowl) were presented and backward masked by either pseudohomophones of the target word (orthographically and phonologically similar, e.g., BOAL), orthographically…

This study asked whether aphasic adults show different noun/verb retrieval patterns based upon their clinical categorization as fluent or nonfluent. Participants selected either the noun or the verb meaning of target words, as presented in three contexts. The framework was that nouns (associated with temporal lobe function) are processed, stored,…

We applied SMR/theta neurofeedback (NF) training at central sites of 20 Israeli children aged 10-12 years, half boys and half girls. Half of the subjects received C3 training and the other half C4 training, consisting of 20 half-hour sessions. We assessed the effects of training on lateralized lexical decision in Hebrew. The lateralized lexical…

ourse comprehensionEvidence conflicts as to whether adults with right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) generate inferences during text comprehension. M. Beeman (1993) reported that adults with RHD fail to activate the lexical-semantic bases of routine bridging inferences, which are necessary for comprehension. But other evidence indicates that adults…

Dyslexia may represent the first example of a LD whereby a possible pathway may link the observed behavior to an underlying neurological substrate that has a neurodevelopmental history beginning with an abnormal gene. Similar efforts are being made to link other cognitive disorders of development to a molecular pathway involved in brain…

Neuroscience researchers identify a cerebral cortex with two functioning hemispheres: a left hemisphere associated with language and speech and a right hemisphere associated with visual-motor activities. Additionally, neuroscientists argue that contemporary lifestyles favor the verbal, logical left brain and often ignore the truths that present in…