PROREAD
Explaining Low Literacy Levels by Profiling Poor Readers and their Support: PROREAD

The Lisbon aim of a knowledge-based economy is compromised by almost 1/5 of all youngsters being poor readers. A significant reduction of poor readers seems paramount, but no "hard" information on poor readers is available. The Pisa study rank ordered countries on educational achievements, but recent reports indicate that the differences within countries are larger than these between countries. Thus a closer look at poor readers themselves seems imperative. Knowledge about individual cognitive skills of poor readers is a key element for insights in poor reading, but is still lacking in present educational approaches. The borrowing of existing databases of rich cognitive information on individual poor readers from neuropsychological domains provides a unique opportunity for the construction and comparison of poor reader cognitive profiles across Europe. Knowledge about the aptness of poor reader support systems is likewise lacking and a comparative survey study is planned to fill this gap. The combination of both types of knowledge by two approaches from traditionally separated fields of research not only goes well beyond anything yet done, but is potentially very powerful, because it creates insights at an educational system level that is empirically founded on directly measured individual cognitive profiles of poor readers.

Partners or collaborators of the project
* Maastricht University, Netherlands (Leo Blomert)
* Université de Provence, France (Johannes Ziegler)
* Universidade do Algarve, Portugal (Alexandra Reis)
* Ludwig Maximilians Universität, Germany (Gerd Schulte-Körne)
* MTA Pszichológiai Kutatóintézet, Hungary (Valeria Csépe)
* Jyväskylän yliopisto, Finland (Heikki Lyytinen)

Following a paper by Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (Hauser et al. 2002: Hauser, M. D., N. Chomsky and W. T. Fitch: The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, And How Did It Evolve? Science 298, 22 November 2002. 1569-1579) we are going to study the assumption that recursion is the unique property of the language faculty and show that the cognitive faculty of grouping can be viewed as a possible basis of linguistic recursion. Based on the study of reaction times, we present the first studies of the faculty of grouping as shown by brain activity. The comparison of results obtained from experiments with healthy subjects and patients with agrammatic aphasia will help us to find out whether the faculty of grouping is present at earlier stages of cognitive development and whether, due to its abstract properties it can serve as the basis for certain more specific cognitive faculties. We will show the connection between the faculty of grouping and the faculty of language by a detailed study of speech prosody: an instrumental study of cognition is aimed at showing the cognitive expenses of prosodic embedding and recursion.
The workplan consists of the following tasks:
a. Behavioural experiments
b. ERP paradigms for embedded sentences
c. CPS (closure positove shift) correlates of visual and intonational markers of phrase boundaries in healthy adults and apahasic patients

Dyslexia genes and neurobiological pathways FP6-2004-LIFESCIHEALTH-5 , No 018696

In a multicentre, multidisciplinary project, including 10 EC countries and 14 research groups, the biological basis of dyslexia is investigate by collecting powerful samples of subjects consistently characterized across EC populations on three different levels: genetics, psychology, and neuroscience. The aim is to understand the etiology of the disorder by integrating the results of the three levels.

On the genetic level, a systematic two stage approach is used to map and clone dyslexia susceptibility genes in samples of 800 families and 2000 dyslexic cases and 2000 controls. The identified risk-conferring genes will also be used to understand gene-gene and gene-environment interactions, as well as gene-specific contributions to a variety of neurobiological correlates of dyslexia.

On the psychology level, the aim is to determine the behavioral phenotypes characteristic to the dyslexic and control group, using uniform psychological test. In Hungary 200-200 children are measured.

On the neuroscience level (structural and functional brain studies including cutting edge tech-nology such as effective connectivity) the prerequisites of reading and spelling development and the central stages of becoming a fluent reader are investigated. The two workgroups, including several laboratories, use modern imaging techniques (coordinated by the leader of the Dutch research group), and the method of event-related brain potentials (coordinated by the leader of the Hungarian research group).

The consortium is a high quality, adaptive and cooperative European consortium composed of psychologists, molecular biologists/geneticists, clinicians and genetic statisticians. With the combined efforts the aim of the consortium is to improve the basis for the development of successful diagnostics and therapies

Our research group was invited in the consortium by the Dutch research group, with whom a successful OTKA-NWO project was finished in 2005.