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Reading for meaning is one of the most important activities in school and everyday life. The simple view of reading (SVR) has been used as a framework for studies of reading comprehension in individuals with Down syndrome (DS). These tend to show difficulties in reading comprehension despite better developed reading accuracy. Reading comprehension difficulties are influenced by poor oral language. These difficulties are common in individuals with DS and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but they have never been compared directly. Moreover, the components of reading for comprehension have rarely been investigated in these populations: a better understanding of the nature of reading comprehension difficulties may inform both theory and practice. The aim of this study was to determine whether reading comprehension in the two populations is accounted for by the same component skills and to what extent the reading profile of the two atypical groups differs from that of typically developing children (TD). Fifteen individuals with DS (mean age = 22 years 4 months, SD = 5 years 2 months), 21 with ASD (mean age = 13 years 2 months, SD = 1 year 6 months), and 42 TD children (mean age = 8 years 1 month, SD = 7 months) participated and were assessed on measures of receptive vocabulary, text reading and listening comprehension, oral language comprehension, and reading accuracy. The results showed similar levels in word reading accuracy and in receptive vocabulary in all three groups. By contrast, individuals with DS and ASD showed poorer non-word reading and reading accuracy in context than TD children. Both atypical groups showed poorer listening and reading text comprehension compared to TD children. Reading for comprehension, investigated through a homograph reading accuracy task, showed a different pattern for individuals with DS with respect to the other two groups: they were less sensitive to meaning while reading. According to the SVR, the current results confirm that the t

Reading for meaning is one of the most important activities in school and everyday life. The simple view of reading (SVR) has been used as a framework for studies of reading comprehension in individuals with Down syndrome (DS). These tend to show difficulties in reading comprehension despite better developed reading accuracy. Reading comprehension difficulties are influenced by poor oral language. These difficulties are common in individuals with DS and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but they have never been compared directly. Moreover, the components of reading for comprehension have rarely been investigated in these populations: a better understanding of the nature of reading comprehension difficulties may inform both theory and practice. The aim of this study was to determine whether reading comprehension in the two populations is accounted for by the same component skills and to what extent the reading profile of the two atypical groups differs from that of typically developing children (TD). Fifteen individuals with DS (mean age = 22 years 4 months, SD = 5 years 2 months), 21 with ASD (mean age = 13 years 2 months, SD = 1 year 6 months), and 42 TD children (mean age = 8 years 1 month, SD = 7 months) participated and were assessed on measures of receptive vocabulary, text reading and listening comprehension, oral language comprehension, and reading accuracy. The results showed similar levels in word reading accuracy and in receptive vocabulary in all three groups. By contrast, individuals with DS and ASD showed poorer non-word reading and reading accuracy in context than TD children. Both atypical groups showed poorer listening and reading text comprehension compared to TD children. Reading for comprehension, investigated through a homograph reading accuracy task, showed a different pattern for individuals with DS with respect to the other two groups: they were less sensitive to meaning while reading. According to the SVR, the current results confirm that the t

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0–6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.

A species detectorclassifier is presented which decides whether or not short groups of clicks are produced by one or more individuals from the following species: Blainville’s beaked whales, short-finned pilot whales, and Risso’s dolphins. The system locates individual clicks using the Teager energy operator and then constructs feature vectors for these clicks using cepstral analysis. Two different types of detectors confirm or reject the presence of each species. Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are used to model time series independent characteristics of the species feature vector distributions. Support vector machines (SVMs) are used to model the boundaries between each species’ feature distribution and that of other species. Detection error tradeoff curves for all three species are shown with the following equal error rates: Blainville’s beaked whales (GMM 3.32%/SVM 5.54%), pilot whales (GMM 16.18%/SVM 15.00%), and Risso’s dolphins (GMM 0.03%/SVM 0.70%).

A species detectorclassifier is presented which decides whether or not short groups of clicks are produced by one or more individuals from the following species: Blainville’s beaked whales, short-finned pilot whales, and Risso’s dolphins. The system locates individual clicks using the Teager energy operator and then constructs feature vectors for these clicks using cepstral analysis. Two different types of detectors confirm or reject the presence of each species. Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are used to model time series independent characteristics of the species feature vector distributions. Support vector machines (SVMs) are used to model the boundaries between each species’ feature distribution and that of other species. Detection error tradeoff curves for all three species are shown with the following equal error rates: Blainville’s beaked whales (GMM 3.32%/SVM 5.54%), pilot whales (GMM 16.18%/SVM 15.00%), and Risso’s dolphins (GMM 0.03%/SVM 0.70%).

A species detectorclassifier is presented which decides whether or not short groups of clicks are produced by one or more individuals from the following species: Blainville’s beaked whales, short-finned pilot whales, and Risso’s dolphins. The system locates individual clicks using the Teager energy operator and then constructs feature vectors for these clicks using cepstral analysis. Two different types of detectors confirm or reject the presence of each species. Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are used to model time series independent characteristics of the species feature vector distributions. Support vector machines (SVMs) are used to model the boundaries between each species’ feature distribution and that of other species. Detection error tradeoff curves for all three species are shown with the following equal error rates: Blainville’s beaked whales (GMM 3.32%/SVM 5.54%), pilot whales (GMM 16.18%/SVM 15.00%), and Risso’s dolphins (GMM 0.03%/SVM 0.70%).

In this paper new dynamic charge injection E/D logics are presented and compared with traditional dynamic ones such as TDFL (Two Phase Dynamic Fet Logic). The main drawbacks of TDFL will be analyzed together with the advantages offered with respect to the static DCFL based topologies; a tentative structure has been derived (MTDFL - Modified TDFL) to comply with the VLSI requirements; then the advantages of the charge injection principles applied to the design of new logic topologies are inspected and used in a pseudo complementary structure (PCDL - Pseudo Complementary Dynamic Logic). The results of the simulations for these structures are presented together with the design of a 4-bits pipelined adder simulated at 2 GHz with a power dissipation 20 times lower than a DCFL implementation.

In this paper new dynamic charge injection E/D logics are presented and compared with traditional dynamic ones such as TDFL (Two Phase Dynamic Fet Logic). The main drawbacks of TDFL will be analyzed together with the advantages offered with respect to the static DCFL based topologies; a tentative structure has been derived (MTDFL - Modified TDFL) to comply with the VLSI requirements; then the advantages of the charge injection principles applied to the design of new logic topologies are inspected and used in a pseudo complementary structure (PCDL - Pseudo Complementary Dynamic Logic). The results of the simulations for these structures are presented together with the design of a 4-bits pipelined adder simulated at 2 GHz with a power dissipation 20 times lower than a DCFL implementation.