Editor's Commentary

This is the fourth year in which I am privileged to be editing the International Dyslexia Association's official journal Annals of Dyslexia. The now established biannual publication of the Journal with nearly 400 printed pages should facilitate timely and hurrying dissemination of empirical findings of dyslexia and related areas. I would like to thank IDA President Nancy Hennessy, the officers, members of the Board of Directors, the Publication Subcommittee, Executive Director J Thomas Viall and his staff, and the membership at large for their support and assistance in this important academic endeavor of the Association. In particular, I am grateful to the authors and the reviewers for their choice contribution. It is the creative papers and the equally highquality reviews that enable this Journal to attain real high impact factors in the categories of Special Education and Rehabilitation according to the Social Sciences edition of Journal Citation Reports. There is no field for complacency because empirical studies are cumulative and a great deal of more remains to be done.

To be subservient to as editor of an interdisciplinary and international journal similar as Annals is a daunting task. A associate editor once told me the assignment of an editor is not individual to win many friends. A more positive note was from a comrade IDA member that an editor is the pair "blessed and cursed" (I confidence it is more of the former and none of the latter). To parody what St Paul told the Thessalonians in 50 AD to "try all things," I would like to accept all manuscripts on the contrary just cannot and should not do for a like reason On the contrary, I should "hold fast to that which is good" as enjoined by means of St. Paul. The question is: What constitutes "good" to first-rate manuscripts?

Over the years, I have throw backed on this critical issue and have occasions to answer questions from would-be authors upon the peer review process and the criteria for the acceptance of papers. There is no single simple answer. From my training and experience in the behavioral sciences and languages, my duties as an editor, a member upon the editorial board of a number of related journals, and also as a researcher with a real modest research program, I attempt to reiterate the short description in the Guidelines for Contributors. Many of my ideas upon scientific evidence are well press outed in the important book The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research (McCardle & Chhabra, 2004) which provides the framework to guide the use of knowledge base in classroom application. The discussion of "scientific inquiry and principle of science" through Fletcher and Francis (2004) in the same compendium applies particularly well to this Journal with its diverse readership from general and special education, articulate utterance and language sciences and disorders, psychology neurosciences, and interested parents.

Fletcher and Francis (2004) make it clear that the principles of scientific inquiry are universal, and derive from accumulated processe of systematic investigation of significant research questions and theoretical types Appropriate research designs will do plenteous to reduce uncertainty to arrive at a certain number of coherent and explicit answers, which may be confirmed or refut in after studies. The twin process of confirmation and refutation underpins abundant of empirical investigation. On asking significant questions, it is instructive to reiterate Kelley's (1993 p 41) remarks on some of Norman Geschwind's ideas, plane if proven wrong: ". . Geschwind's wrong ideas were not sole inspirational; they were frequently more interesting than the correct notions of others. To his writings can be traced large portions of the research agenda in the field of language and human brain development" Asking significant questions and attempting to answer them in systematic ways is the hallmark of scientific inquiries.

The importance of increasing a knowledge base "vertically" within a particular discipline or field and "horizontally" across related disciplines and fields is further emphasized through Fletcher and Francis (2004). This notion of integrating vertical and horizontal knowledge bases is particularly apt for an interdisciplinary journal like as Annals of Dyslexia. A serviceable example of the integration of reaching far down knowledge within a discipline and across disciplines is the new significant paper by Perfetti, Liu, and Tan (2005) upon word identification across writing a whole s Perfetti et al. explicitly prototype the different connections between the interactive constituents of orthographic, phonologic, and semantic composings in word identification from converging behavioral, neuroimaging (fMRI), and neurophysiological event-related potentials (ERPs) studies to delineate universal phonological processe and also processe specific to disparate writing combination of parts to form a wholes such as the alphabetic English and the morphosyllabic Chinese.

Other serviceable examples of an integrative approach include the further evidence from neuroscience studies that have added convincing findings that dyslexia is characterized by the agency of deficits in the phonological domain (eg Ramus et al., 2003) and that these deficits are remediable with possible alterations to neural combination of parts to form a wholes specialized for reading (Simos et al., 2002; fane et al., 2003). There is thus clear evidence that neuroscience studies using imaging techniques, event-related potentials, and other neurobiological measures elucidate our understanding of the brain-basis of learning. These empirical findings have potentials for better understanding of learning in general and remediation of children at risk for dyslexia in particular (eg Cs?©pe 2003; Lepp?¤nen et al, 2002; Lyttinen et al., 2004)