|
|
|
|
|
| Latest Alphabet Fitness News |
September 8, 2007
"Alphabet Fitness programs and games are wonderful! My son has an expressive language disorder...a traffic jam of words that are difficult at times to articulate. Problems as a young child involved his motor skill ability and agility, difficulty with balance, and using writing implements. Alphabet Fitness embraces all types of issues that children face from literacy to mobility."
- L. Kessel, PA
As a fundamental communication tool, have fine-motor, alphabet communication systems altered human well-being?
- Karen Voght, Wellness, Inc, Brookline, MA
Understanding that autism is frequently classified as a complex communication disorder, Wellness, Inc. of Brookline, MA, is working to expand its Alphabet Fitness Program findings to autistic research. In its efforts to help prevent increases in communication and learning disorders, Wellness researches the potential long-term impacts of repetitive learning tools on the body and the brain. Since alphabets are the primary building blocks of instruction and communication, Wellness has researched the developmental history of alphabets for clues to autism and other communication disorders.
This research (www.alphabetfitness.org) led us to conclude that the standard format of fine-motor, sedentary alphabet education needs to be updated in a manner that more actively and comprehensively maps language onto the whole brain. “Thinking is internalized movement,” 1 and an imbalance of fine-motor learning and communication skills can slowly redefine the motor links between the body and brain. The potential long-term side effects of over reliance on fine-motor learned alphabet intelligence may include deconnectivity between body & brain, and increased susceptibility to distractions and stressors. Carried to its extreme, consequences of over concentration on fine-motor alphabet communications just may lead to what Courchesne E. & Pierce K. discuss in their article, “Why the Frontal Cortex in Autism Might be Talking Only to Itself: Local Over-Connectivity But Long-Distance Disconnection.” 2
In line with the following research, Wellness now seeks to apply its Alphabet Fitness programs to help autistic populations. We are looking to break the long-term monopoly that fine-motor alphabet education has had on the body and its brain through our gross-motor Alphabet Fitness Programs, kinesthetic body fonts, reinforcement products and games. Our programs and fun alphabet tools cross-train the child’s brain and ease the transition from gross-motor to fine-motor communications systems. Just like practicing athletes, children physically condition the sounds, images, and spelling of words directly into their body’s stronger, gross-motor memory. This alphabet fitness language learning format offers alternative prevention, intervention, and communication tools for autistic children and their families as it becomes part of each family’s daily routine. Its body-oriented ABCs help enable the child to focus in a world filled with distractions.
1 Velmans, M. 2000. Understanding consciousness. Routledge.
2 Courchesne E, Pierce K. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. Volume 15, Issue 2 , April 2005, Pages 225-230 Cognitive neuroscience.
1. BRAINS OF PEOPLE WITH AUTISM RECALL LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN BRAIN AREAS DEALING WITH SHAPES
NIH / National Institute Of Child Health And Human Development, 2004-11-29
Web Address: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041129112511.htm
In contrast to people who do not have autism, people with autism remember letters of the alphabet in a part of the brain that ordinarily processes shapes, according to a study from a collaborative program of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health.
The study was conducted by researchers in the NICHD Collaborative Program of Excellence in Autism (CPEA) at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. It supports a theory by CPEA scientists that autism results from a failure of the various parts of the brain to work together. In autism, the theory holds, these distinct brain areas tend to work independently of each other. The theory accounts for observations that while many people with autism excel at tasks involving details, they have difficulty with more complex information.
The study and the theory are the work of Marcel Just, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Nancy Minshew, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and their colleagues. The study is scheduled for on-line publication November 29 in the journal Neuroimage, at www.sciencedirect.com.
This finding provides more evidence to support a promising theory of autism, said Duane Alexander, M.D., Director of the NICHD.If confirmed, this theory suggests that therapies emphasizing problem solving skills and other tasks that activate multiple brain areas at the same time might benefit people with autism.
People with autism typically have difficulty communicating and interacting socially with others. The old saying, unable to see the forest for the trees, applies to people with autism, describing how many of them excel at matters of detail, yet struggle to comprehend the larger picture. For example, some children with autism may become champions at spelling bees, but have difficulty understanding the meaning of a sentence or a story.
The language pattern in autism is a microcosm for the disorder Dr. Just said. People with autism are good at a lower level of analysis but have a deficit at the higher level.
In the current study, the researchers used a brain imaging technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity of 14 individuals with high functioning autism while they performed a simple memory task involving letters of the alphabet. Specifically, the study volunteers were shown a sequence of letters. After each letter, they were asked to name the letter that preceded it. In some cases, they were asked to name the letter that appeared two letters previously. The autism volunteers' brain activation patterns were compared to a control group of people who did not have autism, but were of a similar age and I.Q. level.
Both groups successfully completed the task. However, the fMRI scans revealed different brain activation patterns between the two groups. Compared to the control group, the volunteers with autism showed more activation in the right hemisphere, or half, of the brain, and less activation in the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere takes the lead in processing letters, words and sentences, whereas the right hemisphere plays a larger role in processing shapes and visual information.
Dr. Just said that the brain could interpret letters either spatially, as geometric shapes, or linguistically, by the names of the letters. The imaging data indicated that the volunteers with autism remembered letters as shapes, while the control group remembered them by their names.
The brain activation patterns of the two groups also differed in other ways. While performing the task, the group with autism showed less activation in the anterior, or front, parts of the brain, and more activation in the posterior, or rear parts of the brain. Dr. Just explained that the brain's anterior portions carry out higher-level thinking and reasoning while the posterior portion is more involved with perceiving details.
Compared to the control group, the different brain areas of the people with autism were less likely to work in synchrony (at the same time) while recalling the letters. Such synchronization between brain areas takes place during many kinds of higher-level thinking and analysis that prove difficult for many people with autism.
These current findings provide evidence in support of the theory developed by these researchers. Called the theory of underconnectivity in autism, it maintains that autism results from a failure of the brain's neurological wiring--the fibers of nervous system tissue that interconnect the individual parts of the brain. Deprived of effective connections, the different brain areas must work independently, sometimes performing at a higher level individually than they do in people who do not have autism. This may allow some people with autism to excel at spelling and other detail-oriented tasks but make it difficult for them to comprehend more complex material.
The researchers published their theory in the July issue of Brain, in conjunction with the results of another MRI study of volunteers with autism. In that study, volunteers were asked a question about a simple sentence that they had just read. When the people with autism performed the task, their brains showed less synchronization than did the brains of the control group. Moreover, the brains of the group with autism had less activation in an anterior part of the brain that integrates the words of a sentence, and more activation in a posterior brain area that comprehends individual words.
Many behavioral therapies to treat autism stress rote learning, Dr. Minshew explained. Such strategies are helpful, particularly early in a child's development. However, if the theory of underconnectivity proves valid, therapies that stimulate brain areas to work in synchrony might also offer some benefit. Such therapies might stress problem solving skills and creative thinking, and attempt to foster flexibility in thinking.
Dr. Just noted that more evidence to support the theory might come from the group's on-going studies of other cognitive abilities. The researchers are attempting to determine if underconnectivity is a general feature of the brain in autism, and are using brain imaging studies to examine the brain's white matter in people with autism. White matter is the part of the brain that consists of the larger neurological connections spanning different parts of the brain.
2. AUTISM AND THE MOTOR THEORY OF LANGUAGE
by Robin Allott, extracted from The Great Mosaic Eye: Language and Evolution, 2001, Chapter VI. Lewes: Book Guild.
Conclusion
The main idea of the motor theory is that the structures of language, (phonological, lexical and syntactic) derive from and are modeled on neural patterning for motor control. Motor programs for the control of bodily action, by a growth in neural connectivity, became extended to the control of articulation so producing the restricted and specific range of speech sounds found in all human languages; the structures of words were derived from the motor patterning involved in the perception of objects in the external world and from the motor patterning of the actions to which words refer, and syntactic organization of language reflects 'syntactic' processes in the planning and execution of bodily action. The aspect of the motor theory of language origin and function which may be particularly relevant for autism is this: perception and motor control in the normal individual are, and must be, intimately linked (so that we can, for example, see an object and stretch out our hand to pick it up).
If language is derived from and closely associated with the patterning of motor control, then perception, motor control and language must in neural terms be locked together.
For language to develop normally, the neural connections with the motor system must develop at the appropriate time. If they do not, then even if the relation between perception and motor control is normal, the link between the object perceived (scanned by eye-movements) or the action executed or perceived and the word structurally related to the object or action cannot be established. Without the necessary and natural link between word and object or word and action, all the potentialities of higher-level mental functioning, the manipulation of concepts, rational thought, imagination, planning, would be crippled. Meaningful gesture, a motor activity intimately related to speech and seen by many as an integral aspect of speech production, would be defective or absent.
3. Condon, W.S. & Sanders.L.W. (1974) Neonate movement is synchronized with adult speech: interactional participation and language acquisition. Science, 183, 99- 101.
4. Scientists Map Growth of Children's Brains
Reuters and AP, March 9, 2000
www.loni.ucla.edu/media/News/GM_03092000.html
US scientists said yesterday that they had successfully mapped the development of the brains of children between the ages of 3 and 15. The achievement, reported in the science journal Nature, is the first time detailed maps of growth patterns of the human brain have been recorded.
Arthur Toga and researchers at the UCLA School of Medicine in Los Angeles said the images provided new information about which areas of the brain were involved in learning at different ages. The high resolution, three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging scans used in the mapping could also help track the effects of drug treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer.
The researchers studied children between the ages of 3 and 15 years, using MRI scans. They scanned the brains of these children repeatedly over various time intervals, ranging from two weeks to four years. By comparing images from the same children taken at different intervals, the researchers were able to see which parts of their brains showed growth at a given time.
In general, the scientists saw a front-to-back growth over time in a fibre system called the corpus callosum, found near the centre of the brain. These fibres connect the right and left halves of the brain. Children aged 3 to 6 showed a high growth rate in the front part of the corpus callosum, which connects frontal brain regions. The years 3 to 6 happen to be the same time in which children learn to plan and organize, behaviours associated with frontal areas of the brain.
Growth of the back end of the corpus callosum was greatest during years 6 to 13. This rear part of the corpus callosum connects areas of the brain associated with language function. Ages 6 to 11 are also a time when children gain many of their language skills, and psychologists typically report that children have a difficult time learning new languages after age 12.
Growth in this area "may reflect fine tuning of language functions known to occur in late childhood," the authors wrote. Dr. Toga said that the changes in the brain may be driving the changes in behaviour. However, "it may be that the behaviours are driving the brain development," he explained. "It's hard to know."
The researchers also found that growth rates in an area of the brain linked to language were slow between the ages of 3 and 6 but speeded up from 6 to 15 years when fine tuning of language usually occurs.
"The ability to learn new languages declines rapidly after the age of 12 years, as does the ability to recover language function if linguistic areas in one brain hemisphere are surgically resected," the scientists added. The intervals of the scans ranged from two weeks to four years.
5. Why The Frontal Cortex In Autism Might Be Talking Only To Itself: Local
Over-Connectivity But Long-Distance Disconnection.
Courchesne E, Pierce K. Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA, 4/28/05
http://tinyurl.com/a6k93
Although it has long been thought that frontal lobe abnormality must play an important part in generating the severe impairment in higher-order social, emotional and cognitive functions in autism, only recently have studies identified developmentally early frontal lobe defects. At the microscopic level, neuroinflammatory reactions involving glial activation, migration defects and excess cerebral neurogenesis and/or defective apoptosis might generate frontal neural pathology early in development. It is hypothesized that these abnormal processes cause malformation and thus malfunction of frontal minicolumn microcircuitry. It is suggested that connectivity within frontal lobe is excessive, disorganized and inadequately selective, whereas connectivity between frontal cortex and other systems is poorly synchronized, weakly responsive and information impoverished. Increased local but reduced long-distance cortical–cortical reciprocal activity and coupling would impair the fundamental frontal function of integrating information from widespread and diverse systems and providing complex context-rich feedback, guidance and control to lower-level systems. PMID: 15831407 [PubMed - in process]
6. Low-Cost Therapy Shows Promise For Autism
By Amy Norton, 4/19/05
http://tinyurl.com/dyv3g
Reuters Health - A form of therapy that focuses on parents' interactions with their children could help treat autism at a far lower cost than other strategies for the disorder, according to researchers. Their study found that a therapy called responsive teaching, given over one year, led to gains in language and behavioral development among young children with autism or other pervasive developmental disorders – a group of disorders marked by problems in the development of communication and social skills.
Children with autism have, to varying degrees, difficulty in using and interpreting verbal language and body language, and in interacting with other people, including their parents. Responsive teaching works on strengthening this interaction, encouraging parents to "follow their child's lead" and respond to their actions.
The approach is "child-centered," Dr. Gerald Mahoney, a co-author on the new study, told Reuters Health, and it stands in contrast to the widely held belief that education for autistic children must be highly structured and "direct" them in learning particular skills.
"We don't really focus on structured lessons," explained Mahoney, who co-directs the Center on Intervention for Children and Families at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Instead, he said, responsive teaching offers parents strategies they can use to "enhance their daily, routine interactions with their children."
Another way the tactic differs from other forms of autism therapy is in cost. Contact with therapists is limited to about once a week, and the yearly price tag for the program is about $5000 -- a fraction of the cost of many other therapies, which, Mahoney said, can run up to $50,000 a year. Though more research is needed on the effects of responsive teaching, Mahoney noted that the more manageable cost is a potentially "huge advantage" of the approach.
For the current study, reported in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Mahoney and colleague Frida Perales followed 50 children whose parents began responsive teaching when the children were around the age of 2. Some of the children had a pervasive developmental disorder, or PDD -- most commonly autism -- and some had other forms of developmental disabilities.
The idea behind responsive teaching is that by enhancing parents' interactions with their children, the children will "acquire and use pivotal developmental behaviors," which in turn will improve children's language skills and social and emotional development. For instance, if stronger parent-child interactions improve the pivotal behavior of cooperation, the result could be fewer behavioral problems. Similarly, improving the pivotal behavior of "joint attention" between a parent and child could aid in the child's learning of language.
Mahoney and Perales found that while parents and children in their study met with therapists only about 32 times during the year, the parents said that they used responsive teaching strategies -- such as imitating their children, or following their lead -- about 15 hours per week, on average. After a year, the researchers found, the children showed large gains in their cognitive development, especially when it came to communication skills. Their rate of development in terms of expressive language increased by an average of 167 percent, while their ability to understand language improved by nearly as much, according to the report.
Between 70 and 80 percent of the children showed such improvements. Children with PDDs also showed improvements in the social and emotional problems they had at the study's outset, according to Mahoney and Perales.
Responsive teaching is one form of "relationship-focused" education for children with developmental disorders -- a theoretical approach that also includes the more widely known "Floor Time" program developed by Dr.Stanley Greenspan. Though he has reported success with that program based on a chart review of 200 children, Mahoney and Perales note in their report,
the lack of rigorous research into relationship-focused education makes it too soon to recommend the approach for PDDs.
The new findings, they conclude, "provide support for the notion that relationship-focused intervention can be an effective procedure for enhancing the development of children with PDD."
However, they add, more research -- including studies that use comparison groups of children not treated with a relationship-focused approach -- is needed to "gain greater confidence" in the therapy's potential benefits.
SOURCE: Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, April 2005.
7. Dads Must Connect With Autistic Kids Too
http://www.mydna.com/resources/news/200504/news_20050406_autkidda.html
Make room for daddy, say University of Florida autism experts.
Teaching fathers how to communicate and play with their autistic children
pays dividends, for parents and kids alike.
Autism is a developmental disability that typically appears during the
first three years of life and is characterized by problems interacting and
communicating with others. Caring for an autistic child can be a relentless
and labor-intensive task - one that is overwhelmingly performed by mothers,
says UF nursing researcher Jennifer Elder.
Now UF researchers have found that teaching fathers how to talk to and
play with their autistic children in a home setting improved communication,
increased the number of intelligible words the youngsters spoke by more than
50 percent and helped dads get more involved in their care. The findings
were published in a recent issue of the journal Nursing Research.
"We found that fathers were getting frustrated because they felt they
couldn't connect with their autistic child," said Elder, the study's
principal investigator and an associate professor and chairwoman of the
department of health care environments and systems at UF's College of
Nursing. "During one of our sessions, a child made eye contact with his
father and said 'Daddy' for the first time in the child's life."
"Traditionally, mothers are the primary caretakers of autistic
children," Elder added. "Through our training, we caused a shift in the
paradigm of many of these families, with fathers taking on a more active
role with their autistic children, sometimes even taking the lead in
caretaking."
At least 1.5 million Americans have some form of autism, and it now
affects one in every 166 births, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
UF researchers examined 18 father-child relationships before and after
specialized training sessions. The families were recruited through UF's
Center for Autism and Related Disabilities and a community health practice
in Central Florida and included 14 boys and four girls ranging in age from 3
years to 7 years old.
Building on a similar study of mothers of autistic children, Elder
videotaped the father-child pairs in their homes during playtime sessions
before training and at three key stages in the training process. The
training emphasized language development and taught fathers to use everyday
activities like playing with building blocks, puppets, cars and trucks, and
bubbles to interact with their children.
UF researchers assessed each child's behavior and evaluated how
fathers interacted with them at the beginning of the study and during each
of the three training stages. They also recorded each child's autistic-like
behaviors during and after play. During the first stage, fathers learned to
initiate play with their children through animated repetition of their
children's vocalizations and actions. Fathers were told to resist the
temptation to direct their child's play and instead to follow the child's
lead. In the second phase, they were told to wait for their child's response
before continuing play. Eventually, the two techniques were used together.
The fathers were able to view the videotaped sessions to see their
progress and areas needing improvement were discussed.
"We are really interested in promoting social balance, or turn-taking,
in autistic children and their parents," Elder said. "Normally, the parent
might cue the child with one question, ask another question without waiting,
and the child gets very frustrated and starts not to even attempt to
respond. To combat that, we teach the parents to give a cue and wait for the
response, with the expectation that the child will respond to establish that
social balance."
Fathers were more likely to initiate play in an animated way and
responded more to their children during playtime. Children also became more
vocal and were more than twice as likely to initiate play with their
fathers. Surveys completed after the study was over also revealed that
fathers viewed the training as valuable.
"One father related how after training, he felt empowered in his
paternal role and became an active school liaison," Elder said. "This proved
beneficial for the child, who now had both parents consistently involved in
his education."
Researchers also were surprised to find that many fathers in the study
actually took the lead in training the mothers and even siblings in the rest
of the family, a key distinction from the mothers in her previous study,
Elder said. In that study, researchers found similar benefits to training
mothers, but moms weren't as likely to attempt to teach fathers the
techniques they learned.
Recent research has shown that early intervention with children can
have a major influence on how the child develops and functions later in
life. "With the proper training at an early age, we feel that these
techniques can help autistic children be more socially interactive and pick
up language more easily," Elder said.
Because of the study's small sample size, Elder and her research team
plan to continue their research with a larger group of fathers and fine-tune
the interventions used based on their experiences in this study. They also
plan to show fathers how to train their spouses in the techniques, and then
evaluate the effectiveness of that approach. In addition, they are
developing a Web site so training "booster" sessions can be broadcast via
the Internet to participating fathers. Fathers will be able to view these
training sessions and hear comments on how to improve upon their play
sessions with their children.
"It is important for both the child's mother and father to be involved
in parent training whenever possible," said Jaime Winter, a research
scientist at the University of Washington Autism Center who previously
conducted autism research at the University of California-San Diego.
"Potential benefits that may follow from father participation include
increased frequency of interaction and quality of interaction between
fathers and their child with autism, increased treatment time for the child
and support for the child's mother."
Brief Commentary: To be fair to some dads, it should be pointed
out that presuming there is a genetic component to autism, some fathers too,
may have some social developmental deficits that make it difficult for them
to play empathetically with anyone, even their own kids, autistic or
otherwise. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it do the
backstroke. Non-nerdy dads should resist using this as an excuse to not get involved with their families, however. -LS.
8. A Question of Breeding
By Rod Liddle for The Spectator, London. Thanks to Keith Hearn.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=5795&issue=2005-03-12
Why has there been such an enormous rise in the number of children diagnosed as ‘autistic' in the last 20 or so years? How can we account for the quite astonishing increase in cases of this harrowing and alienating affliction? The question frightens parents; it bamboozles scientists. It leaves our politicians looking shifty and averting their gaze.
The statistics do indeed tend to worry us all. They are diffuse in their results, as ever, but seem to suggest a tenfold increase over the last 15 or 20 years. The National Autism Society in the UK has suggested an increase from 4.5 cases per 10,000 births in 1966 (study by Victor Lotter) to 91 cases per 10,000 births in 1997. A study in Michigan indicated a 900 per cent rise between 1982 and 1997.
The worry, as by now you will have gathered, is not confined to the UK: autism has been in an apparent exponential increase across the affluent developed world. The number of people in the UK who are estimated to be afflicted with one or another of the autism spectrum disorders (which includes the closely related but milder Asperger's Syndrome) was more than 500,000 in 1997. Full essay here.
REFERENCES: in order of article presentation
1. Brains Of People With Autism Recall Letters Of The Alphabet In Brain Areas Dealing With Shapes
NIH / National Institute Of Child Health And Human Development, 2004-11-29
Web Address: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041129112511.htm
2. Autism and The Motor Theory Of Language
Robin Allott [Extracted from The Great Mosaic Eye: Language and Evolution. 2001. Chapter VI. Lewes: Book Guild.]
3. Condon, W.S. & Sanders.L.W. (1974) Neonate movement is synchronized with adult speech: interactional participation and language acquisition. Science, 183, 99- 101.
4. Scientists Map Growth of Children's Brain
Reuters and AP. March 9, 2000
www.loni.ucla.edu/media/News/GM_03092000.html4/28/05
5. Why The Frontal Cortex In Autism Might Be Talking Only To Itself: Local Over-Connectivity But Long-Distance Disconnection.
http://tinyurl.com/a6k93
Courchesne E, Pierce K. Department of Neurosciences, University of
California, San Diego, CA, USA. 4/19/05
6. Low-Cost Therapy Shows Promise For Autism
By Amy Norton. http://tinyurl.com/dyv3g
7. Dads Must Connect With Autistic Kids Too
http://www.mydna.com/resources/news/200504/news_20050406_autkidda.html
8. A Question of Breeding
By Rod Liddle for The Spectator, London. Thanks to Keith Hearn.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=5795&issue=2005-03-12
RECENT RESEARCHER COMMENTS ON ALPHABET FITNESS PROGRAM:
“I have looked at your website. Any procedures which sharpen autistic
children's motor capabilities, particularly when directly linked to
language aspects, offer the prospect of speech improvement. Guided
gesture has helped. It will be interesting to see the effect in practice
of the body patterning linked to letter shapes in your system.” - Dr Robin Allott, The Great Mosaic Eye: Language and Evolution. 2001
“It looks very interesting and certainly worthwhile. We certainly can always improve our methods for teaching and learning. Certainly the relationship between specific curricula and brain maturation deserves lots more attention. I wish you luck and success with your work.” - Dr. Arthur W. Toga, Laboratory of Neuro Imaging ,UCLA School of Medicine
|
|
|
|
|
|
