AT AGE 5, KEILLAN LECKY DREADED kindergarten. So many of the words her playmates gleefully shouted or conspiratorially whispered seemed to hover just out of reach, as elusive as a vanishing rainbow. Her difficulty understanding them was starting to affect her schoolwork. Then, last summer, Keillan, along with 21 other language-impaired children, was enrolled in an experimental program at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, in which the kids improved their auditory skills by playing computer games. The change in Keillan and the others was so remarkable, says Paula Tallal, co-director of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers, that even the scientists were stunned. After just four weeks of therapy, Tallal and her colleagues report in a recent issue of the journal Science, youngsters who were performing well below age level had jumped as much as two years.
For parents and teachers who have watched children like Keillan struggle so long with so little gain, the announcement was encouraging news. If larger studies bear out the results, then at least some cases of language impairment--those that stem from an inability to decode spoken words--may find effective treatment.
That in itself would be an important breakthrough. This form of language impairment afflicts up to 8% of otherwise normal children, most of whom go on to develop intractable problems with reading and writing. But Tallal and her colleagues take their findings one step further, and in doing so have aroused intense scientific controversy. They believe the same language-processing "glitch" may be the root of the more common problem of dyslexia, a reading disability that affects perhaps 15% of the population. If so, games like those that Keillan played could help at least some dyslexics whose impairment makes it hard for them to fully share in all the vital knowledge and pleasure that come with the printed word.
Can such a debilitating learning disorder really be remedied by playing games? Other experts, while praising Tallal's work as provocative and challenging, remain skeptical. Tallal, they point out, has not yet demonstrated that her therapy is effective for the broader population of dyslexics. But as Yale University's Dr. Sally Shaywitz, a behavioral pediatrician, acknowledges, "We don't need to speculate. We can carry out studies that answer this question."
The children enrolled in the Rutgers study had one thing in common: although they are of at least average intelligence, tests showed that they frequently had difficulty distinguishing among phonemes (the basic building blocks of language), especially those that begin with hard consonants like b, d and p. "There is nothing wrong with their ears," says Tallal. "They can hear these sounds, but the auditory centers of the brain can't process them."
The problem, Tallal believes, is all in the timing. Vowel-rich sounds resonate for 100 milliseconds, sometimes longer, and are thus easier to make out than hard consonants, which fly by in normal conversation at speeds of 40 milliseconds or less. Language-impaired children, Tallal has demonstrated, can more reliably identify fast consonants when the sounds are slowed to half their normal speed.