Editor's Commentary

Annals of Dyslexia, Jun 2005 by Leong, Che Kan

This is the fourth year in which I am privileged to be editing the International Dyslexia Association's official journal Annals of Dyslexia. The now established biannual publication of the Journal with nearly 400 printed pages should facilitate timely and speedy dissemination of empirical findings of dyslexia and related areas. I would like to thank IDA President Nancy Hennessy, the officers, members of the Board of Directors, the Publication Subcommittee, Executive Director J. Thomas Viall and his staff, and the membership at large for their support and assistance in this important academic endeavor of the Association. In particular, I am grateful to the authors and the reviewers for their excellent contribution. It is the creative papers and the equally highquality reviews that enable this Journal to attain very high impact factors in the categories of Special Education and Rehabilitation according to the Social Sciences edition of Journal Citation Reports. There is no room for complacency because empirical studies are cumulative and much more remains to be done.

To serve as editor of an interdisciplinary and international journal such as Annals is a daunting task. A fellow editor once told me the assignment of an editor is not one to win many friends. A more positive note was from a fellow IDA member that an editor is both "blessed and cursed" (I hope it is more of the former and none of the latter). To parody what St. Paul told the Thessalonians in 50 AD to "try all things," I would like to accept all manuscripts but just cannot and should not do so. On the contrary, I should "hold fast to that which is good," as enjoined by St. Paul. The question is: What constitutes "good" to excellent manuscripts?

Over the years, I have reflected on this critical issue and have occasions to answer questions from would-be authors on the peer review process and the criteria for the acceptance of papers. There is no one simple answer. From my training and experience in the behavioral sciences and languages, my duties as an editor, a member on the editorial board of a number of related journals, and also as a researcher with a very modest research program, I attempt to reiterate the short description in the Guidelines for Contributors. Many of my ideas on scientific evidence are well expressed in the important book The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research (McCardle & Chhabra, 2004), which provides the framework to guide the use of knowledge base in classroom application. The discussion of "scientific inquiry and principle of science" by Fletcher and Francis (2004) in the same compendium applies particularly well to this Journal with its diverse readership from general and special education, speech and language sciences and disorders, psychology, neurosciences, and interested parents.

Fletcher and Francis (2004) make it clear that the principles of scientific inquiry are universal, and derive from accumulated processes of systematic investigation of significant research questions and theoretical models. Appropriate research designs will do much to reduce uncertainty to arrive at some coherent and explicit answers, which may be confirmed or refuted in subsequent studies. The twin process of confirmation and refutation underpins much of empirical investigation. On asking significant questions, it is instructive to reiterate Kelley's (1993, p. 41) comments on some of Norman Geschwind's ideas, even if proven wrong: ". . . Geschwind's wrong ideas were not only inspirational; they were frequently more interesting than the correct notions of others. To his writings can be traced large portions of the research agenda in the field of language and human brain development." Asking significant questions and attempting to answer them in systematic ways is the hallmark of scientific inquiries.

The importance of increasing a knowledge base "vertically" within a particular discipline or field and "horizontally" across related disciplines and fields is further emphasized by Fletcher and Francis (2004). This notion of integrating vertical and horizontal knowledge bases is particularly apt for an interdisciplinary journal such as Annals of Dyslexia. A good example of the integration of deep knowledge within a discipline and across disciplines is the recent, significant paper by Perfetti, Liu, and Tan (2005) on word identification across writing systems. Perfetti et al. explicitly model the different connections between the interactive constituents of orthographic, phonologic, and semantic components in word identification from convergent behavioral, neuroimaging (fMRI), and neurophysiological event-related potentials (ERPs) studies to delineate universal phonological processes, and also processes specific to disparate writing systems such as the alphabetic English and the morphosyllabic Chinese.

Other good examples of an integrative approach include the further evidence from neuroscience studies that have added convincing findings that dyslexia is characterized by deficits in the phonological domain (e.g., Ramus et al., 2003), and that these deficits are remediable with possible alterations to neural systems specialized for reading (Simos et al., 2002; Temple et al., 2003). There is thus clear evidence that neuroscience studies using imaging techniques, event-related potentials, and other neurobiological measures elucidate our understanding of the brain-basis of learning. These empirical findings have potentials for better understanding of learning in general and remediation of children at risk for dyslexia in particular (e.g., Csépe, 2003; Leppänen et al, 2002; Lyttinen et al., 2004).