Reading skill and language skill

To learn to read is to acquire a visual language skill which systematically maps onto extant spoken language skills. Some children perform this task quite adeptly while others encounter much difficulty, and it has become a question of both scientific and practical merit to ask why there exists such a range of success in learning to read. Obviously, learning to read places a complex burden on many emerging capacities, and in principle, at least, reading disability could arise at any level from visual perception to general cognition. Yet since reading is parasitic on spoken language, the possibility also exists that reading disability is derived from some subtle difficulty in the language domain. This article reviews some of the many studies which have explored the association between early reading skills and spoken language skills. The focus will be on findings which reveal that when the linguistic short-term memory skills of good and poor beginning readers are critically examined, considerably many, though perhaps not all, poor readers prove to possess subtle deficiencies which correlate with their problems in learning to read.     

Nonsuicidal Self‐Injury Is Predictive of Suicide Attempts Among Individuals with Mood Disorders

Nonsuicidal self‐injury (NSSI) prior to age 18 was evaluated as a risk factor for adulthood suicide attempt (SA). Archival data from 222 mood‐disordered participants were analyzed using multivariate Cox proportional hazards analysis. Participants with a youth SA were excluded. The hazards of SA among adult participants with a history of youth NSSI were twice than those of mood‐disordered participants without youth NSSI (hazard ratio = 2.00, 95% confidence interval = 1.16–3.44, p = .01). Moreover, participants who had both youth and adult NSSI attempted suicide significantly earlier than participants who began NSSI as an adult. Youth NSSI is associated with persistent, elevated SA risk in adulthood.     

The effects of environmental change on chicks' responses to a familiar stimulus

The purpose of the present experiments was to explore chicks' proximity seeking behaviour in relation to imprinting objects in unfamiliar settings. Experiment I showed that chicks, which were individually imprinted on a stationary imprinting object, displayed reduced proximity seeking behaviour when tested in a pen smaller than the rearing pen. This finding confirmed earlier work on the effects of changed pen size. Experiment II used continuous and intermittent noise rearing and testing conditions, in all possible combinations, and a stationary imprinting object. Increased proximity seeking was found in conditions where the auditory environment was changed from rearing to testing, a result apparently opposite to that obtained in earlier work. It is suggested that the effect of environmental change on proximity seeking may vary with the modality in which change occurs and the salience of the imprinting object.