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Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a
learning disability characterized by a difficulty in using words and
even symbols for knowledge acquisition. Dyslexic patients have
particular problems with phonemes – those linguistic units that make-up
words. As a consequence, dyslexic patients often have problems with
reading, writing and spelling. Almost by definition, a person with
dyslexia has a wide discrepancy between his ability to read and his
intelligence, learning aptitude and age level. Researchers will refer to
the dyslexic patient as being "two standard deviations" below normal in
reading – which simply means that they're near the bottom of their class
in reading ability.
Dyslexic children will often exhibit
the following behaviors:
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Have difficulty in hand writing
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Have difficulty in reading at their
grade level
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May have been slow to talk as a
child
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Have problems identifying letters
and words
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Have problems in verbally
expressing themselves
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Confuse directions as well as
handedness
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May have problems with math
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Reverses letters and words
Dyslexia affects about three times as
many boys as girls. About 10% of children have varying degrees of
dyslexia. It is not related to intelligence per se, it is not a
behavioral problem or a social problem or a psychological problem. This
does not mean that dyslexic children do not develop various types of
problems – they may because of the lack of knowledge about their
condition, which is often undiagnosed or misdiagnosed.
People with dyslexia will report that
words seen to jump around on the printed page and words and letters
appear superimposed. Although people with dyslexia will sometimes see a
"d" as a "b" and reverse words like "god" and "dog", it is important to
note that young children who are learning to read and write will also
have these common errors. Unlike normal children, however, dyslexic
children never "grow out of" such problems. There is no "cure" for
dyslexia. This does not mean that there are no remediation strategies
available for such children.
Recent research suggests that dyslexia
may be related to how the brain receives and processes transient or time
varying information. For example when a child reads, his eyes make very
rapid "saccadic" eye movements from one word to the next on the line of
the printed page. This visual information travels along the visual
pathways to cortical (brain) sites that are used for vision as well as
information processing for identifying words and their meaning. Research
has shown that one of these brain sites, called Visual Area 5, does not
process correctly this transient visual information . As a consequence,
as a dyslexic child tries to read, his brain scrambles the words on the
page making it difficult to read.
Other research suggests that another
problem in dyslexia is the processing of the fundamental units of words
– called phonemes. There are 44 phonemes that make-up the English
language. It is believed that people with dyslexia have a difficult time
in encoding these phonemes in order to store and retrieve written
language. As a consequence, a person with dyslexia may not have a
problem in talking but may have a problem in writing and reading.
If you suspect that your child is
dyslexic, you should ask your school personnel or school counselor or
school psychologist to test you child for dyslexia. For a start, have
your child complete the dyslexia test as found at the Dyslexia Institute
in England (http://www.dyslexiaaction.org.uk/). Go to
http://www.dyslexia-inst.org.uk/dys_test.htm take the test.
Also go the Web site for the International Dyslexia Association (http://www.interdys.org/)
where you can also find-out about what needs to be done. |
