Phonological awareness development in children with and without spoken language difficulties: A 12-month longitudinal study of German-speaking preschool children

Purpose: There is strong empirical evidence that English-speaking children with spoken language difficulties (SLD) often have phonological awareness (PA) deficits. The aim of this study was to explore longitudinally if this is also true of preschool children speaking German, a language that makes extensive use of derivational morphemes which may impact on the acquisition of different PA levels. Method: Thirty four-year-old children with SLD were assessed on eleven PA subtests at three points over a 12-month period and compared to 97 four-year-old typically developing (TD) children. Result: The TD-group had a mean percentage correct of over 50% for the majority of tasks (including phoneme tasks) and their PA skills developed significantly over time. In contrast, the SLD-group improved their PA performance over time on syllable and rhyme but not on phoneme level tasks. Group comparisons revealed that children with SLD had weaker PA skills, in particular on phoneme level tasks. Conclusion: The study contributes a longitudinal perspective on PA development before school entry. In line with their English-speaking peers, German-speaking children with SLD showed poorer PA skills than TD peers, indicating that the relationship between SLD and PA is similar across these two related but different languages

Computerised speechreading training for deaf children: A randomised controlled trial

Purpose: We developed and evaluated in a randomised controlled triala computerised speechreading training programme to determine a) whether it is possible to train speechreading in deaf children and b) whether speechreading training results in improvements in phonological and reading skills.Previous studies indicate a relationship between speechreading and reading skill and further suggest this relationshipmay be mediated by improved phonological representations. This is important since many deaf children find learning to read to be very challenging. Method: Sixty-six deaf 5-7 year olds were randomised into speechreading and maths training arms. Each training programme was comprised of10 minutesessionsa day, 4 days a week for 12 weeks. Children were assessed on a battery of language and literacy measures before training, immediately after training, 3 months and 10 months after training. Results: We found no significant benefits for participants who completed the speechreading training, compared to those who completed the maths training, on the speechreading primary outcome measure. However, significantly greater gains were observed in the speechreading training group on one of the secondary measures of speechreading. There was also some evidence of beneficial effects of the speechreading training on phonological representations, however these effects were weaker. No benefits were seen toword reading. Conclusions: Speechreading skill is trainable in deaf children. However, to support early reading, training may need to be longer or embedded in a broader literacy programme. Nevertheless, a training tool that can improve speechreading is likely to be of great interest to professionals working with deaf children

Enhancing the NASA Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resource Web Data Delivery System with Geographic Information System (GIS) Capabilities

Renewable energy technologies are changing the face of the world's energy market. Currently, these technologies are being incorporated within existing structures to increase energy efficiency. Crucial to the success of the emerging renewable market is the availability of accurate, global solar radiation, and meteorology data. This poster traces the history of the development of an effort to distribute data parameters from NASA's research for use in the energy sector applications spanning from renewable energy to energy efficiency. These data may be useful to several renewable energy sectors: solar and wind power generation, agricultural crop modeling, and sustainable buildings

Speech production in children with Down's syndrome: The effects of reading, naming and imitation

People with DS are known to have difficulties with expressive language, and often have difficulties with intelligibility. They often have stronger visual than verbal short-term memory skills and, therefore, reading has often been suggested as an intervention for speech and language in this population. However, there is as yet no firm evidence that reading can improve speech outcomes. This study aimed to compare reading, picture naming and repetition for the same 10 words, to identify if the speech of eight children with DS (aged 11-14 years) was more accurate, consistent and intelligible when reading. Results show that children were slightly, yet significantly, more accurate and intelligible when they read words compared with when they produced those words in naming or imitation conditions although the reduction in inconsistency was non-significant. The results of this small-scale study provide tentative support for previous claims about the benefits of reading for children with DS. The mechanisms behind a facilitatory effect of reading are considered, and directions are identified for future research

NASA Products to Enhance Energy Utility Load Forecasting

Existing energy load forecasting tools rely upon historical load and forecasted weather to predict load within energy company service areas. The shortcomings of load forecasts are often the result of weather forecasts that are not at a fine enough spatial or temporal resolution to capture local-scale weather events. This project aims to improve the performance of load forecasting tools through the integration of high-resolution, weather-related NASA Earth Science Data, such as temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed. Three companies are participating in operational testing one natural gas company, and two electric providers. Operational results comparing load forecasts with and without NASA weather forecasts have been generated since March 2010. We have worked with end users at the three companies to refine selection of weather forecast information and optimize load forecast model performance. The project will conclude in 2012 with transitioning documented improvements from the inclusion of NASA forecasts for sustained use by energy utilities nationwide in a variety of load forecasting tools. In addition, Battelle has consulted with energy companies nationwide to document their information needs for long-term planning, in light of climate change and regulatory impacts

Towards an Improved High Resolution Global Long-Term Solar Resource Database

This paper presents an overview of an ongoing project to develop and deliver a solar mapping processing system to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) using the data sets that are planned for production at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). NCDC will be producing a long-term radiance and cloud property data set covering the globe every three hours at an approximate resolution of 10 x 10 km. NASA, the originators of the Surface meteorology and Solar Energy web portal are collaborating with SUNY-Albany to develop the production system and solar algorithms. The initial result will be a global long-term solar resource data set spanning over 25 years. The ultimate goal of the project is to also deliver this data set and production system to NREL for continual production. The project will also assess the impact of providing these new data to several NREL solar decision support tools

Usage of NASA's Near Real-Time Solar and Meteorological Data for Monitoring Building Energy Systems Using RETScreen International's Performance Analysis Module

This paper describes building energy system production and usage monitoring using examples from the new RETScreen Performance Analysis Module, called RETScreen Plus. The module uses daily meteorological (i.e., temperature, humidity, wind and solar, etc.) over a period of time to derive a building system function that is used to monitor building performance. The new module can also be used to target building systems with enhanced technologies. If daily ambient meteorological and solar information are not available, these are obtained over the internet from NASA's near-term data products that provide global meteorological and solar information within 3-6 days of real-time. The accuracy of the NASA data are shown to be excellent for this purpose enabling RETScreen Plus to easily detect changes in the system function and efficiency. This is shown by several examples, one of which is a new building at the NASA Langley Research Center that uses solar panels to provide electrical energy for building energy and excess energy for other uses. The system shows steady performance within the uncertainties of the input data. The other example involves assessing the reduction in energy usage by an apartment building in Sweden before and after an energy efficiency upgrade. In this case, savings up to 16% are shown

Long-Term Validation and Variability of the Shortwave and Longwave Radiation Data of the GEWEX Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) Project

In this investigation, we make systematic Surface Radiation Budget-Baseline Surface Radiation Network (SRB-BSRN), Surface Radiation Data Centre (SRB-WRDC) and Surface Radiation Budget-Global Energy Balance Archive (SRB-GEBA) comparisons for both shortwave and longwave daily and monthly mean radiation fluxes at the Earth's surface. We first have an overview of all the comparable pairs of data in scatter or scatter density plots. Then we show the time series of the SRB data at grids in which there are ground sites where longterm records of data are available for comparison. An overall very good agreement between the SRB data and ground observations is found. To see the variability of the SRB data during the 21.5 years, we computed the global mean and its linear trend. No appreciable trend is detected at the 5% level. The empirical orthogonal functions (EOF) of the SRB deseasonalized shortwave downward flux are computed over the Pacific region, and the first EOF coefficient is found to be correlated with the ENSO Index at a high value of coefficient of 0.7083