The lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) suggests that skilled reading requires high-quality lexical representations. In children, these representations are still developing, and it has been suggested that this development leads to more adult-like eye-movement behavior during the reading of connected text. To test this idea, a set of young adolescents (aged 11-13 years) completed ...

Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in word usage. Here, we show that a direct application of information theory quantifies the relationship between the statistical distribution of words and the se...

This paper argues that glossing is an essential stage in the borrowing of writing systems. I use the term “glossing” in a somewhat extended sense to refer to a process where a text in one language is prepared (annotated, marked) to be read in another. I argue that this process of “vernacular reading” – reading a text written in the script, orthography, lexicon and grammar of a more prestigious ...

Apical and basolateral determinants specify and maintain membrane domains in epithelia. Here, we identify new roles for two apical surface proteins – Cadherin 99C (Cad99C) and Stranded at Second (SAS) – in conferring apical character in Drosophila tubular epithelia. Cad99C, the Drosophila ortholog of human Usher protocadherin PCDH15, is expressed in several embryonic tubular epithelial structur...

OBJECTIVE To investigate organised teaching in accident and emergency (A&E) departments in England and Wales. METHODS A survey was carried out by postal questionnaire. Directed to senior house officers (SHOs), the questionnaire examined the nature and extent of departmental teaching, and measured the availability, suitability, and actual use made of guidelines. Of 231 questionnaires sent, 164...

This paper explores the cognitive presence of the learners in MOOCs through using a (computational) linguistic analysis of the learners’ Point-of-View as an indicator for cognitive presence. The linguistic analysis of the written language as a medium of interaction by the students in the context of MOOCs shows hallmarks of cognitive disengagement and low cognitive presence

In this study the print awareness of 25 unschooled adult illiterates in the Netherlands was compared with that of 24 pre-reading children and of 23 low-educated literate adults with approximately four years of primary schooling. The illiterates were interviewed about their experiences with writing and all participants completed six assessments of print awareness in the language they preferred (...

In a recent paper Logan and Schumann (in press) introduced the notion of neo-dualism in which phenomena are described in terms of two domains: the physiosphere and the symbolosphere. The physiosphere is simply the material world consisting of both living and non-living matter. The symbolosphere, originally introduced by Schumann (2003a & b), consists of the human mind and all its abstract thoug...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to get a deeper understanding into how adults with cerebral palsy (CP) experience physiotherapy and physical activity in a perspective from childhood to adulthood; and how personal and environmental factors influence possibilities for physiotherapy and physical activity. METHOD Data was collected through interviews with 22 community-living adults (35 - 68 yea...

Written language is an evolutionarily recent human invention; consequently, its neural substrates cannot be determined by the genetic code. How, then, does the brain incorporate skills of this type? One possibility is that written language is dependent on evolutionarily older skills, such as spoken language; another is that dedicated substrates develop with expertise. If written language does d...