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What is Dyslexia? It is the most common neurobehavioral disorder in children. It affects both boys and girls equally with prevalence estimates ranging from 5-10% to as high as 17.5%. It is a language disorder. Poor readers are as adept as good readers at copying visually confusable letters and words from memory, but they are significantly poorer at naming or pronouncing these items on second exposure. The poor naming of letter or word forms is due to less well-established verbal codes rather than to visual-perceptual deficits. You are born with it. Dyslexia is dyslexia in any language. It is not due to the results of a head injury or an illness such as severe recurrent ear infections. Forty percent of dyslexic children also have an affected sibling, and studies have reported anywhere from 23% to 65% of children who have a dyslexic parent also have dyslexia. Dyslexia will not go away. A dyslexic child can be taught to read, but dyslexia is a chronic and lifelong processing difficulty. Even after they learn to read, they still read more slowly than other children and reading remains effortful for them. Dylexia is a differential brain function manifesting itself as a specific learning disability for language, ie. Reading (decoding), spelling (encoding), and writing (memory of movement) as well as speaking. It is characterized by difficulties in single word decoding (the ability to translate written symbols into recognizable words). The reading process can be broken down into two elements: decoding and comprehension. A dyslexic reader, because of trouble hearing and sequencing the sounds that make up words, will have difficulty translating the written symbols into sounds, blending them together, then identifying that combination of sounds with a known word. What truly identifies a dyslexic child is the inability to read nonsense words, like “zirdn’t”, which might be read as “dirty”. Although dyslexic children usually have adequate listening comprehension skills, their difficulty in decoding obscures their understanding printed material. An insufficient phonological processing ability is another characteristic of dyslexia. A phoneme is the smallest identifiable segment of speech. Phonological processing is the ability to become aware that speech can be broken down into phonemes (sounds) and that these phonemes are represented by printed forms. For example, The word bat is actually three phonemes (b/a/t/), but it seems like one sound. When learning to read, the word “bat” can only be recognized if it can be segmented into its underlying phonological elements. Dyslexic readers have to be specifically taught to hear and attend to the phonological structure of speech, either through using alternate sensory channels to reinforce the sound-letter combination, or through using the motor image (the feeling a sound makes on the lips and tongue) of the speech sound to reinforce the association. A second independent factor that contributes to dyslexia is known as rapid automatized naming or RAN. It is the ability to rapidly retrieve a label for an object that one already knows, like the name of a familiar person or a color. Problems with rapid automatized naming will, therefore, affect reading speed. Reading is known as a receptive language skill, like listening. Writing and spelling are expressive language skills, the print equivalent of talking. The same processes, which affect decoding, will also affect the ability to output the correct sequences of sounds in written work, and the same type of errors are often found in a dyslexic’s reading and their spelling. It is not surprising that the same child who reads “sleep” as “sheep” will try to spell “look” as “lock”, or “done” as “dun.” |
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