Perspectives on the Classification of Specific Developmental Disorders is an up-to-date review of the controversy surrounding the classification of such disparate disorders as reading, spelling, writing, and language disorders. Severe and specific impairments in these functions do exist and appear to follow a developmental course. How to identify children presenting with such problems and how to operationalize the disorders has long challenged professionals. This text grew from an international symposium held in the Netherlands, but all chapters have been specially prepared for the...

Literacy research has continued to develop at a rapid pace in these last five years of the millennium. New ideas about how children learn to read have led to a better understanding of the causes of progress and failure in the mastery of literacy, with repercussions for children's assessment and teacher education. These new discoveries also allow teachers to transcend the old debates in reading instruction (phonics versus whole language) and offer the path to a synthesis. At the same time, research with teachers about their own implementation of methods and the development of their own...

From August 19-23 1996 an international expert meeting on problems and interventions in literacy development took place in Amsterdam. The meeting was organized by Pieter Reitsma (Paedologisch Instituut - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Ludo Verhoeven (University of Nijmegen), and funded by the Dutch National Science Foundation. Various experts in the field of literacy problems from 12 countries attended the meeting while presenting a paper based on current peESpectives and recent research. A selection of the papers being presented is now integrated into a single academic reference, after...

A balanced view of recent research on reading disability is presented by leading international scholars representing various subdisciplines of psychology and allied sciences. The volume provides researchers, graduate students, educators and other professionals with up-dated and practical useful knowledge of and insights into the latest theories and findings of the nature and causes of reading disability. Rational guidelines for assessment, prevention and intervention are also provided, based on such concepts as phonological and orthographical processing, automaticity and metacognition....

Literacy research has continued to develop at a rapid pace in these last five years of the millennium. New ideas about how children learn to read have led to a better understanding of the causes of progress and failure in the mastery of literacy, with repercussions for children's assessment and teacher education. These new discoveries also allow teachers to transcend the old debates in reading instruction (phonics versus whole language) and offer the path to a synthesis. At the same time, research with teachers about their own implementation of methods and the development of their own...

Dyslexia research has been proceeding by quantum leaps. Great advances have been made in the past few years, and while many unanswered questions remain, we nonetheless do know a great deal about the causes and nature of the condition, and how teachers should treat it. This book, by two of Europe's leading experts, gathers together a vast amount of recent international research on the causes and remediation of dyslexia, and presents a cognitive model of the normal reading process and a process-analytic diagnostic model. Much of this material appears in English for the first time.

The present book contains selected contributions from the international conference "Basic Mechanisms of Language and Language Disorders." This conference was held in Leipzig in September 1999, and was organized by the Department of Psychology at the University of Leipzig in collaboration with the Max-Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. It was held to commemorate the 120th anniversary of the foundation of the world's first institute of experimental psychology by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig. This edition examines new results from...

Suzanne Flynn and Wayne O'Neil Massachusetts Institute of Technology I. INTRODUCTION The theory of Universal Grammar (UG) as explicated e. g. in Chomsky, 1986, has led to explosive developments in the study of natural language as well as to significant advances in the study of first language (L I) acquisition. Most recently. the theory of UG has led to important theore tical and empirical advances in the field of adult second language (L2) acquisition as well. The principle impetus for this development can be traced to the work in linguistics which shifted the study "from behavior or the...

There is a growing need for appropriate management of aquatic plants in rivers and canals, lakes and reservoirs, and drainage channels and urban waterways. This management must be based on a sound knowledge of the ecology of freshwater plants, their distribution and the different forms of control available including chemical, physical, biological and biomanipulation. This series of papers from over 20 different countries was generated from the highly successful European Weed Research Society symposia on aquatic plant management, this being the ninth. The contributions provide a valuable...

There is an increasing need for an understanding of the fundamental processes involved in the mechanisms by which disease resistances are introduced into crop plants. This book provides a wide-ranging coverage of the successes and failures of the classical techniques; it describes the advances towards modern technology and addresses the problems of pathogen variation. Crop plants that are considered include: cereals (wheat, barley, rice), potatoes, vegetables and soft fruits.