Search

Copying a text quickly and accurately is important both in school and in daily life. However, this skill has never been systematically studied, either in children with typical development (TD) or in children with specific learning disabilities (SLD). The aim of this research was to study the features of a copy task and its relationship with other writing tasks. For this purpose, 674 children with TD and 65 children with SLD from Grades 6 through 8 in Italy were tested with a copy task and other writing assessment tasks, measuring three aspects of writing: handwriting speed, spelling, and expressive writing. Children with SLD performed worse on the copy task, both in terms of speed and accuracy, than children with TD. Copy speed was predicted by grade level and by all three major writing skills for children with TD but only by handwriting speed and spelling for children with SLD. Copy accuracy was predicted by gender and the three major writing skills for children with TD but only by spelling for children with SLD. These results suggest that children with SLD also have difficulty copying a text and benefit less than children with TD from their other writing skills.

AbstractTranscription skills allow us to put spoken language into written text, and they entail handwriting processes and spelling knowledge. Handwriting and spelling are supported by different processes, but they are highly related. Additionally, both are directly supported by working memory (WM). The present study aims to examine how differently passive and active components of WM affect transcription (handwriting and spelling) among Italian beginner writers. We evaluated 395 Italian first-grade children (197 boys and 198 girls) with an average age of 6 years and 6 months (SD = 4.3 months) with five writing tasks (three handwriting tasks and two spelling tasks) and two WM tasks (passive components = span task; active components = selective span task). We computed a SEM analysis to investigate how differently the passive and active WM components affect the two spelling tasks both directly and via handwriting. Passive and active WM components directly affect handwriting; while spelling is directly affected by the active WM, and indirectly (via handwriting) by both WM components. These results confirmed the crucial role of handwriting in predicting spelling accuracy. In conclusion, current results show that the distinction between passive and active WM components is useful to understand how WM supports transcription processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children with a Specific Learning Disorder (SLD) write linguistic material more slowly than children with typically developing (TD). However, it is not known whether the same difficulties are present when they write numbers. The goal of the present study was to fill this gap and to compare TD's and SLD's speed in writing numbers both in words and in digits. Therefore, we examined the ability to write numbers in words and digits (numerals) in a sample of sixth- to eighth-grade children diagnosed with SLD. We assessed 32 children with SLD (17 males and 15 females) and a control group of students with TD matched for sex, age, and grade with two writing speed tasks: writing numbers in words and in digits. The two tasks were administered both in normal condition (N) and in articulatory suppression condition (AS). We found that 6th to 8th graders with a SLD were slower than TD children when writing numbers, both in words and in digits, and their slowness was similar in the two cases. However, when the tasks were carried out under a condition of articulatory suppression, the SLD group exhibited a conspicuous impairment, only when writing numbers in words. A similar pattern of performance was observed also in the case of writing errors. We concluded that children with SLD have a general speed problem that may affect writing of different materials but also a specific problem related to the processing of phonological information during writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local traditions have always been endangered by colonialism and modernity. For centuries under Western systems of domination in Africa they were exploited for colonial purposes and even subverted, and in many cases they were reinvented under both modern and imperial discourses. Nevertheless, new traditions have also emerged from both colonial and modern legacies that today shape contemporary social and spatial landscapes. To explore these issues, this article examines the Ajuda neighborhood in Guinea-Bissau's capital of Bissau, which was built in the 1960s under Portuguese colonial rule to accommodate mainly public servants and their families from the African population. It aims to unveil how Guinean traditions related to dwelling space, reorganized within the colonial spatiality, have reemerged to shape and transform present-day domestic environments. Using the house as a critical tool, the article discusses how traditions may thus endure as long as they are negotiated in relation to new conditions that may derive from disruptive events, such as colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a time-domain (TD) raw signal simulator for an interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR). We consider the case of a spaceborne SAR operating in stripmap, spotlight, and hybrid modes, but the case of an airborne SAR can be considered as well. The spaceborne platform is considered as traveling on its nominal (Keplerian) orbit, and the targets are located on an ellipsoidal earth. We describe an accurate TD simulator, highlighting its usefulness in studying the effects on the SAR impulse response and on images from targets with limited extension due to operational conditions different from the nominal one. Index Terms--Interferometry, simulation, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), time-domain (TD) analysis.