EDITOR'S COMMENTARY

Going into my fifth year as editor of Annals of Dyslexia, the official journal of the International Dyslexia Association, I would again like to thank IDA's President, Board of Directors, the Publications Subcommittee, the executive director, and her staff members for their support and assistance. I am particularly grateful to the authors, the Associate Editors, other Editorial Board members, and many ad hoc reviewers from different disciplines and different countries for their excellent contribution. These colleagues have provided me with stimulating ideas in different aspects of dyslexia during the review process and many e-mail exchanges. In many cases we agree, and in some cases we disagree, but we do so agreeably. I have learned much from the continuous academic discourse in addition to my intensive study of related literature that may be in the periphery of my knowledge and experience. For the high technical quality of the production of the Journal, I thank the compositor and the printer.

This issue begins with an in-depth review paper on linguistic and cultural influences on brain organization of language with implications for dyslexia. This is followed by two papers, one on reading fluency and the other on the double-deficit hypothesis tested on an adult group. The fourth paper is on processing derived morphological forms in "high-functioning" adults with dyslexia. The last two papers are on the effect of native language and literacy measures on foreign language proficiency and difficulties. The topics discussed are varied, and yet all pertain to language learning and reading and their difficulties.

LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN

In the first paper, Johansson, a neurologist by training with research interests in cerebrovascular lesions, brain plasticity, and language and music processing in the brain, has provided readers with an in-depth integration and critique of current literature from the neurological, neuropsychological, and psycholinguistic literature on various aspects of brain organization of first and second language learning and brain activation in dyslexia. As discussed in the review and shown in a number of functional imaging studies, reading acquisition activates widely distributed areas in the left occipitotemporal and left inferior frontal areas and less of posterior right inferotemporal areas (e.g., Price & Mechelli, 2005; Turkeltaub, Gareau, Flowers, Zeffiro, & Eden, 2003).

The disruption of the connectivity of temporoparietal and frontal network within the language system with concomitant difficulties in language-related functions in dyslexia such as phonological awareness, phonological memory, and naming, has been shown to be amenable to partial amelioration with intensive, evidence-based phonological processing remediation (Shaywitz et al., 2004; Simos et al., 2002; Temple et al., 2003). Of the various reading remediation imaging studies, the Shaywitz et al. (2004) reading intervention on fMRI in children should be particularly noted. This study is noteworthy in terms of the duration of the year-long evidence-based phonological training, the large sample sizes of experimental children (n = 37) and the two control groups (total of 40 children), the demonstration of elevated activation in left hemisphere regions with gains in reading fluency, and the durable development of the occipitotemporal region critical for skilled reading even one year after the intervention, among other significant results (Shaywitz et al., 2004). From a different perspective, education-induced brain plasticity has been shown by Li et al. (2006) in an fMRI and PET study of silent word reading and picture naming by illiterate and literate healthy Chinese adults (12 in each group), thus suggesting that education might have enhanced cognitive processing efficiency in language tasks.

LANGUAGE CREATED DE NOVO

The discussion of a new sign language created by deaf Nicaraguans not exposed to a developed language and the segmenting and sequential combination of information by successive cohorts of learners (Senghas & Coppola, 2001; Senghas, Kita, & Özyüek, 2004) points to the transformation of this Nicaraguan signing from an early gestural form into a linguistic system. Sign language or language by eye and hand to denote spatial relation and modulations of shared reference of objects and ideas has been shown to follow similar syntactic and morphological structure of spoken language or language by ear and mouth (see Klima & Bellugi, 1979). The young Nicaraguan sign language, recently created by children de novo provides initial data from exceptional situations into the process of language emergence, language genesis, and the trajectory of language change as found in mature languages.

These data by Senghas and her colleagues (2001, 2004) have rekindled the continuing debate as to whether or not children are born with an innate capacity for language structure; if they possess general strategies to draw information from the environment for solving immediate problems of day-to-day communication and social contact; or if language emergence results from the interaction between innate "language acquisition device" and heightened environmental exposure. In her commentary on the emergence of another sign language created de novo, the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (Sandler, Meir, Padden, & Aronoff, 2005), also alluded to by Johansson, Goldin-Meadow (2005) suggested that sharing a sign language across users and passing a sign system from one cohort to the other play an important role in creating language structure and helping language grow.