Uncovering the social determinants of brain injury rehabilitation.

Social determinants of health (SDH), such as social isolation and loneliness, are often more frequently experienced in brain injury survivors. The paper explores the personal experiences of loneliness among brain injury survivors during lockdown to negate health inequalities and improve rehabilitation for this population in the future. Twenty-four brain injury survivors participated in semi-structured interviews and questionnaires relating to loneliness, resilience and wellbeing. Three themes (the experience of loneliness, loneliness during the pandemic and loneliness after the pandemic) explored survivors' experiences of loneliness generally post-brain injury, but also chronicle how these feelings developed in lockdown and survivors' feelings regarding society returning to 'normal'. Future interventions should focus on reframing survivors' beliefs regarding societal expectations and minimise the pressure they experience to keep up with their peers physically and emotionally. Additionally, we recommend creating accessible peer support options for all brain injury survivors as an important step for alleviating loneliness.

Exposure to dialect variation in an artificial language prior to literacy training impairs reading of words with competing variants but does not affect decoding skills.

Many bidialectal children grow up speaking a variety (e.g., a regional dialect) that differs from the variety in which they subsequently acquire literacy. Previous computational simulations and artificial literacy learning experiments with adults have demonstrated lower accuracy in reading contrastive words for which dialect variants exist compared with noncontrastive words without dialect variants. At the same time, exposure to multiple varieties did not affect learners' ability to phonologically decode untrained words; in fact, longer literacy training resulted in a benefit from dialect exposure as competing variants in the input may have increased reliance on grapheme-phoneme conversion. However, these previous experiments interleaved word learning and reading/spelling training, yet children typically acquire substantial oral language knowledge prior to literacy training. Here we used artificial literacy learning with adults to examine whether the previous findings replicate in an ecologically more valid procedure where word learning precedes literacy training. We also manipulated training conditions to explore interventions thought to be beneficial for literacy acquisition, such as providing explicit social cues for variety use and literacy training in both varieties. Our findings replicated the reduced accuracy for reading contrastive words in those learners who had successfully acquired the dialect variants prior to literacy training. This effect was exacerbated when literacy training also included dialect variation. Crucially, although no benefits from the interventions were found, dialect exposure did not affect reading and spelling of untrained words suggesting that phonological decoding skills can remain unaffected by the existence of multiple word form variants in a learner's lexicon. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

How does dialect exposure affect learning to read and spell? An artificial orthography study.

Correlational studies have demonstrated detrimental effects of exposure to a mismatch between a nonstandard dialect at home and a mainstream variety at school on children's literacy skills. However, dialect exposure often is confounded with reduced home literacy, negative teacher expectation, and more limited educational opportunities. To provide proof of concept for a possible causal relationship between variety mismatch and literacy skills, we taught adult learners to read and spell an artificial language with or without dialect variants using an artificial orthography. In 3 experiments, we confirmed earlier findings that reading is more error-prone for contrastive words; that is, words for which different variants exist in the input, especially when learners also acquire the joint meanings of these competing variants. Despite this contrastive deficit, no detriment from variety mismatch emerged for reading and spelling of untrained words, a task equivalent to nonword reading tests routinely administered to young schoolchildren. With longer training, we even found a benefit from variety mismatch on reading and spelling of untrained words. We suggest that such a dialect benefit in literacy learning can arise when competition between different variants leads learners to favor phonologically mediated decoding. Our findings should help to assuage educators' concerns about detrimental effects of linguistic diversity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).