Illiterate Adults Research Articles

A Lurian systemic-dynamic approach to teaching illiterate adults a new language with literacy.

The Israeli educational system faces the specific challenge of teaching Hebrew as a second language to new immigrants from Ethiopia, who are illiterate in th...

Factors associated with daily sitting time in a rural community-dwelling of older adults from southern Brazil

The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence and associated factors with daily sitting time among older adults in a rural community in southern Brazil. This cross-sectional household-based study involved 477 subjects (≥ 60 years) of both sexes (2010-2011). Daily sitting time was estimated by questionnaire, and the sitting data were divided into two groups based on tertiles: (< 6 hours/day, and highest tertile: ≥ 6hours/day). The explanatory variables were: sex, age, schooling, living arrangements, occupation throughout life, currently working, number of morbidities, falls, nutritional status, cognitive status, smoking and alcohol consumption. The Poisson’s regression [prevalence ratio (PR) and confidence interval (CI) 95%] verified the association among explanatory variables and highest sitting tertile. According the results, the mean daily sitting time was 5.5 ± 3.2 hours/day. The proportion of older adults within the highest tertile of daily sitting time was 43.8%. Adjusted analyses showed that being older (PR 1.02, CI95%:1.01-1.04), being male (PR1.23, CI95%: 1.04-1.45), living with other people (PR 1.38, CI95%:1.02-1.86), having worked in agriculture (PR 1.24 CI95%: 1.04-1.48), and not working (PR1.21, CI95%:1.02-1.44), each were positively associated with highest terlile of daily sitting time. The illiterate older adults (PR=0.70; 95% CI=0.55 - 0.89), subjects who had never smoked (PR 0.60, CI95%: 0.46-0.78) and those underweight (PR 0.49, CI95%: 0.30-0.79) were less likely to be in the highest tertile of daily sitting time (inverse association). In conclusion, the socio-demographic and lifestyle-related variables are associated with the highest terlile of daily sitting time.

Emergence of Reading and Writing in Illiterate Adults After Matching-to-Sample Tasks

Reading and writing are behaviors that provide an individual with the opportunity for inclusion in many social environments. Despite the importance of these behaviors, statistical indices show that, in Brazil, 8.6% of the people aged 15-24 are illiterate. The purpose of this manuscript, which is divided into two studies, was to assess the effects of a Portuguese language reading curriculum for simple (Study 1) and complex words (Study 2) in illiterate adults. Four participants took part in each study. In both studies, reading was taught mainly by training dictated words to printed words relations. Overall, there was an increase in the percentage of correct responses in reading and writing tasks when pre-tests and post-tests were compared; results were more consistent in reading tasks. Future studies should continue to investigate procedures with these goals for this population.

Reading in the Brain Revised and Extended: Response to Comments

Reading in the Brain (Les neurones de la lecture, 2007) examined the origins of human reading abilities in the light of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. It argued that reading acquisition, in all cultures, recycles preexisting cortical circuits dedicated to invariant visual recognition, and that the organization of these circuits imposes strong constraints on the invention and cultural evolution of writing systems. In this article, seven years later, I briefly review new experimental evidence, particularly from brain imaging studies of illiterate adults, which indicates that reading acquisition invades culturally universal cortical circuits and competes with their prior function, including mirror‐invariant visual recognition and face processing. In response to my critics, I emphasize how brain plasticity and brain constraints can be reconciled within the Bayesian perspective on learning. I also discuss the importance of a newly discovered gesture system in reading and writing. Finally, I argue that there is consistent evidence for deep cross‐cultural universals in writing systems, as well as for the multiple subtypes of dyslexia that are expected given the broad set of areas recruited by the reading task.

Similar ventral occipito-temporal cortex activations in literate and illiterate adults during the Chinese character matching task: An fMRI study

Visual word expertise is typically associated with enhanced ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) cortex activation in response to written words. Previous study utilized a passive viewing task and found that vOT response to written words was significantly stronger in literate compared to the illiterate subjects. However, recent neuroimaging findings have suggested that vOT response properties are highly dependent upon the task demand. Thus, it is unknown whether literate adults would show stronger vOT response to written words compared to illiterate adults during other cognitive tasks, such as perceptual matching. We addressed this issue by comparing vOT activations between literate and illiterate adults during a Chinese character and simple figure matching task. Unlike passive viewing, a perceptual matching task requires active shape comparison, therefore minimizing automatic word processing bias. We found that although the literate group performed better at Chinese character matching task, the two subject groups showed similar strong vOT responses during this task. Overall, the findings indicate that the vOT response to written words is not affected by expertise during a perceptual matching task, suggesting that the association between visual word expertise and vOT response may depend on the task demand.

Análise dos erros apresentados por adultos iletrados ao longo de um programa informatizado de ensino de leitura e escrita

The typology of errors presented by children in the acquisition of reading and writing has been widely explored. Error analyses allow inferring sources of behavior control throughout the learning process and are an important tool for improving programs that teach reading and writing. Nevertheless, few studies have explored the types of errors made by illiterate adults. This is a descriptive study aiming to identify and analyze the errors made by adults participating in the process of learning to read and write using a computerized teaching program. The purpose was to evaluate the adequacy of the program and to point out whether there is a need to develop specific procedures for this population. Fifteen adults were individually submitted to the program, which comprises a sequence of teaching steps and assessments (pre and post-tests and intermediate tests). Errors made by the students were categorized and analyzed according to categories described in the literature as well as new ones created specifically for this study. The data show a high concentration of errors in some categories, particularly for the first teaching module, with partial indication of error type specificity for the population in focus. This study also shows the participants' difficulties in writing (construction spelling task), requiring improvement of the computerized program when applied to adult literacy.

Gaining Mismatch Negativity! Improving Auditory Phoneme Discrimination by Literacy Training ? A Pre-Post Event-Related Potential Study

Illiteracy is still present in the society these days. Several studies have shown that illiterate individuals lack important cognitive prerequisites for literacy acquisition, such as auditory phoneme discrimination. Therefore, the current study investigated auditory phoneme discrimination in illiterate individuals before and after a one-year literacy course. We analyzed the characteristic event-related brain potential (ERP) marker for auditory phoneme discrimination, namely Mismatch Negativity (MMN).The results showed a significant enhancement of the amplitude of MMN from before to after a one-year literacy course. This finding indicates the close relationship between literacy acquisition and auditory phoneme discrimination. Further, it indicates the importance of considering discrimination training in literacy courses, especially for illiterate adults

Patterns of Roughness in Global Literacy Rates

This study examines the literacy rate of 204 countries all over the world focusing on both male and female population with ages 15 years old and above. The source indicates that of all the illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds are women. Data also reveal that extremely low literacy rates are concentrated in three regions: Afghanistan, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Sahelian Africa, where around one-third of the men and half of all women are illiterate. Using fractal statistical analysis, it was found out that there is a varying pattern or complexity in the literacy rates among the male and female populations of the 204 countries; the fractal dimension of literacy rate of male is higher compared to the female. Based on the findings, it is concluded that since there are several countries with extremely low literacy rates, then the Millennium Development Goal of eradicating illiteracy by 2015 cannot be achieved. The study recommends that the governments should look into the fractality of the other indicators of human development and prosperity of the countries.

Training-related changes in early visual processing of functionally illiterate adults: evidence from event-related brain potentials.

BackgroundEvent-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to investigate training-related changes in fast visual word recognition of functionally illiterate adults. Analyses focused on the left-lateralized occipito-temporal N170, which represents the earliest processing of visual word forms. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from 20 functional illiterates receiving intensive literacy training for adults, 10 functional illiterates not participating in the training and 14 regular readers while they read words, pseudowords or viewed symbol strings. Subjects were required to press a button whenever a stimulus was immediately repeated.ResultsAttending intensive literacy training was associated with improvements in reading and writing skills and with an increase of the word-related N170 amplitude. For untrained functional illiterates and regular readers no changes in literacy skills or N170 amplitude were observed.ConclusionsResults of the present study suggest that the word-related N170 can still be modulated in adulthood as a result of the improvements in literacy skills.

Effect of literacy level on cognitive and language tests in Korean illiterate older adults

Illiterate individuals represent a significant proportion of the world's population. Acquisition of reading and writing skills influences the functional status of the brain, and consequently alters the performance on cognitive and language tests. Thus, it is important to identify the degree of the impact of levels of both illiteracy and education as potential confounders on test performance in people with neurological communication disorders. A total of 203 community-dwelling older adults aged 65 years and older were recruited for the present study. Participants were classified into four groups based on the literacy level; pure illiterate (n=29), semi-illiterate (n=67), literate (n=75) and high-level literate (n=32). The participants completed the Mini-Mental State Examination, Boston Naming Test, Controlled Oral Word Association Test (animal), verb naming, and sentence comprehension tests. The pure illiterate group showed the lowest performance on all five tests. Regression analysis showed that literacy level was the variable that best predicted the performance on cognitive and language tests. These findings suggest that literacy in performance on cognitive and language tests is an important factor in neuropsychological evaluations for older adults.

Learning and empowerment: Designing a financial literacy tool to teach long-term investing to illiterate women in rural India

Abstract The objectives of this paper are two-fold. First, it aims to bring attention to the learning and educational needs of the almost one billion illiterate adults in the world who have little or no means for furthering their education in traditional settings. More than two-thirds of illiterate adults in the world are women and their education can have an immense impact on societal development. When we think of learning in its cultural context through social interaction, this population presents a unique vantage point to test and extend our theoretical ideas. Second, the paper presents an exploratory case study that demonstrates how research on learning can guide human empowerment by addressing everyday problems and how addressing these problems, in turn, can contribute to our understanding of how people learn. Specifically, we present a design-based research and implementation case of a financial literacy tool constructed to assist learners in understanding the advantages of long-term investment. Our findings demonstrate the advantages of leveraging the local context to construct teaching aids and supports viewing learning as the creation and enactment of situated practices.

Is the Cambridge Cognitive Examination - Revised a good tool for detection of dementia in illiterate Brazilian older adults?

Few studies have been published on the use of the Cambridge Cognitive Examination Test - Revised (CAMCOG-R) for cognitive assessment of low educational level older adults. The aim of the present study was to determine the accuracy of the Brazilian version of the CAMCOG-R (Br-CAMCOG-R) within a sample of low educational level and illiterate older adults. The Br-CAMCOG-R was administered to outpatients in a public geriatric clinic. The diagnosis of dementia was based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fourth Edition criteria. The receiving operator characteristic curves were plotted, and the best trade-offs between sensitivities and specificities were calculated. A total of 189 participants were evaluated. The mean age was 77 ± 6.9 years. The mean educational level was 3.1 ± 2.2 years. The mean test score was 66.5 ± 13.1 points; there were 56 (29.6%) participants with dementia. The best cut-off score for illiterate participants was 50/51; sensitivity, specificity and area under the curve (AUC) were 69%, 69% and 0.75, respectively; for participants with a low educational level, the best cut-off point was 60/61; the sensitivity, specificity and AUC were 83%, 85%, and 0.93, respectively; for participants with a middle educational level, the best cut-off point was 69/70; the sensitivity, specificity and AUC were 90%, 76% and 0.91, respectively. The Br-CAMCOG-R was useful for identifying cases of dementia among older adults with middle and low levels of literacy, but inadequate for the illiterate individuals.

The deficit of letter processing in developmental dyslexia: combining evidence from dyslexics, typical readers and illiterate adults

To clarify the link between anomalous letter processing and developmental dyslexia, we examined the impact of surrounding contours on letter vs. pseudo-letter processing by three groups of children - phonological dyslexics and two controls, one matched for chronological age, the other for reading level - and three groups of adults differing by schooling and literacy - unschooled illiterates and ex-illiterates, and schooled literates. For pseudo-letters, all groups showed congruence effects (CE: better performance for targets surrounded by a congruent than by an incongruent shape). In contrast, for letters, only dyslexics exhibited a CE, strongly related to their phonological recoding abilities even after partialling out working memory, whereas the reverse held true for the pseudo-letter CE. In illiterate adults, the higher letter knowledge, the smaller their letter CE; their letter processing was immune (to some extent) to inference from surrounding information. The absence of a letter CE in illiterates and the positive CE in dyslexics have their origin in different aspects of the same ability, i.e. phonological recoding.

Literacy acquisition reduces the influence of automatic holistic processing of faces and houses

Writing was invented too recently to have influenced the human genome. Consequently, reading acquisition must rely on partial recycling of pre-existing brain systems. Prior fMRI evidence showed that in literates a left-hemispheric visual region increases its activation to written strings relative to illiterates and reduces its response to faces. Increasing literacy also leads to a stronger right-hemispheric lateralization for faces. Here, we evaluated whether this reorganization of the brain's face system has behavioral consequences for the processing of non-linguistic visual stimuli. Three groups of adult illiterates, ex-illiterates and literates were tested with the sequential composite face paradigm that evaluates the automaticity with which faces are processed as wholes. Illiterates were consistently more holistic than participants with reading experience in dealing with faces. A second experiment replicated this effect with both faces and houses. Brain reorganization induced by literacy seems to reduce the influence of automatic holistic processing of faces and houses by enabling the use of a more analytic and flexible processing strategy, at least when holistic processing is detrimental to the task.

AN OPINION SURVEY ON ISSUES OF PROVISION AND MANAGEMENT OF ADULT LITERACY PROGRAMME IN NIGERIA: IMPLICATIONS FOR PLANNING

There are almost 800 millions illiterate adults worldwide (UNESCO, 2005) Based on the above, there is an urgent need to expand the vision of both the MDGs to capture education for adult, so as to achieve the widespread agreement that through adult basic education and literacy intervention, human and social development can be enhanced (UNDP, 1997).This paper therefore examines issues in the provision and management o f adult literacy programme in Nigeria through a descriptive survey analysis o f ex- post facto. Guided by 4 Research questions and 1 hypothesis, findings revealed the perceptions o f beneficiaries in respect o f this programme. The paper concludes that the successful implementation o f adult literacy programme is the only way o f ensuring sustainable development in the country because it is only a man that can distinguish between truth and falsehood. He is really free to choose and participate actively in promoting socio. economic and political development o f his/her country while the planning implications were likewise highlighted.

Private Speech in Illiterate Adults: Cognitive Functions, Task Difficulty, and Literacy

Children's private speech has been widely studied among children, but it is clear that adults use pri- vate speech as well. In this study, illiterate adults' private speech during a ''school-like'' task was explored as a function of literacy level and task difficulty in a sample of 126 adults enrolled in a public literacy program. A main effect for literacy level was found—private speech was more internalized and less externalized among adults with higher literacy levels. Externalized private speech was more frequently observed among illiterate adults engaged in the most difficult task. Private speech served cognitive functions as indicated by the proportion of self-regulatory private speech and the proportion of private speech pre- ceding actions being higher in the advanced literacy group and among illiterate adults doing the easier task. Internal- ized private speech, self-regulatory private speech, and private speech preceding action were each positively cor- related with performance and negatively correlated with time to complete the task. The use of private speech in illiterate adults appears to be linked to the mastery of cultural experiences, such as literacy, similar to the self- talk of children.

LEARNING TO READ IN ADULTHOOD: AN EVALUATION OF A LITERACY PROGRAM FOR FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE ADULTS IN GERMANY

It is estimated that 759 million individuals worldwide are illiterate, i.e. they cannot read or write properly. With 95%, the majority of the illiterate population lives in developing countries. In most cases, these individuals did not attend school and, therefore, did not have the chance to acquire any skills in reading and writing. They are referred to as primary illiterates. However, illiteracy is not restricted to developing countries: In developed countries there are individuals who have great difficulties with reading and writing despite attending school for several years; they are termed as functional illiterates. For most individuals, the ability to read and write is crucial for being employed and socially accepted. Thus, education is an essential prerequisite for personal growth and satisfaction with life. The present research presents an innovative approach to overcome deficits in reading and writing in adults. The effectiveness of the program was investigated in two courses, each comprising 18 German functionally illiterate adults. Results show that participation in the program was accompanied by improved literacy skills and neuronal changes measured with fMRI. Key words: adulthood, fMRI, evaluation, functional illiteracy, reading and writing, training program.

Bridging the gap between illiterate older adults and cognitive stimulation technologies through pervasive computing

The global ageing of the population has made the increase in age-related diseases more obvious, some of which are accompanied by a patient's cognitive decline (CD). That is a hard problem for Mexico, as a large number of older adults belong to marginalized sectors. These older adults are characterized by their illiteracy and limited financial resources, which make them more vulnerable to conditions such as the Alzheimer's disease. According to the literature, a person who participates often in cognitive stimulation (CS) activities reduces the risk of suffering a CD-related condition. This has provided the motivation to carry out case studies to understand older adults' interactions in CS sessions, and their relation with technologies and with members of their social family networks (SFN). To address these technological, social and illiteracy gaps, a pervasive CS collaborative system has been designed and evaluated which eases interaction through natural interfaces and enables SFN members to interact with older adults during their CS activities regardless of their physical location. The evaluation results provide evidence that participants perceived the system as useful, easy to use and providing a pleasurable user experience. Furthermore, these results show the feasibility of augmenting traditional board games (e.g. chess, checkers) to create pervasive CS collaborative applications and the importance and benefits of integrating SFN members as informal caregivers.

Auditory phoneme discrimination in illiterates: Mismatch negativity—A question of literacy?

These days, illiteracy is still a major problem. There is empirical evidence that auditory phoneme discrimination is one of the factors contributing to written language acquisition. The current study investigated auditory phoneme discrimination in participants who did not acquire written language sufficiently. Auditory phoneme discrimination was analyzed in illiterate adults and literate controls by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while participants listened to standard and deviant phonemes (oddball paradigm). The results showed that only literate controls yielded mismatch negativity (MMN), the characteristic ERP marker for auditory discrimination. In illiterates, no discernible MMN was observed. These findings indicate the importance of written language acquisition for the development and maintenance of auditory phoneme discrimination. The reduced ability in discriminating phonemes in adult illiterates suggests potential training measures concerning literacy acquisition in these adults.

From hand to eye: The role of literacy, familiarity, graspability, and vision-for-action on enantiomorphy

Literacy in a script with mirrored symbols boosts the ability to discriminate mirror images, i.e., enantiomorphy. In the present study we evaluated the impact of four factors on enantiomorphic abilities: (i) the degree of literacy of the participants; (ii) the familiarity of the material; (iii) the strength of the association between familiar objects and manipulation, i.e., graspability; and (iv) the involvement of vision-for-action in the task. Three groups of adults – unschooled illiterates, unschooled ex-illiterates, and schooled literates – participated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants performed a vision-for-perception task, i.e., an orientation-based same–different comparison task, on pictures of familiar objects and geometric shapes. Graspability of familiar objects and unfamiliarity of the stimuli facilitated orientation discrimination, but did not help illiterate participants to overcome their difficulties with enantiomorphy. Compared to a baseline, illiterate adults had the strongest performance drop for mirror images, whereas for plane rotations the performance drop was similar across groups. In Experiment 2, participants performed a vision-for-action task; they were asked to decide which hand they would use to grasp a familiar object according to its current position (e.g., indicating left-hand usage to grasp a cup with the handle on the left side, and right-hand usage for its mirror image). Illiterates were as skillful as literates to perform this task. The present study thus provided three important findings. First, once triggered by literacy, enantiomorphy generalizes to any visual object category, as part of vision-for-perception, i.e., in visual recognition and identification processes. Second, the impact of literacy is much stronger on enantiomorphy than on the processing of other orientation contrasts. Third, in vision-for-action tasks, illiterates are as sensitive as literates to enantiomorphic-related information.