Femtalk USA - Dyslexia
Dyslexia
Chaotic?
Dreamy?
Clumsy?
Angry or frustrated?
So bright in some ways but unaccountably slow in others?
Is this YOUR child
or YOU?
You may not have
associated these descriptions with what you have read or heard about dyslexia,
but this learning difficulty is much more than just an inability to read.
(Some dyslexic children have reading ages two, three, even four years behind
their actual age.)
And dyslexia doesn't go away, though it can be helped.
Dyslexia symptoms vary
according to the severity of the disorder as well as the age of the
individual.
Pre-school age
children
It is difficult to
obtain a certain diagnosis of dyslexia before a child begins school, but
many dyslexic individuals have a history of difficulties that began well
before kindergarten. Children who exhibit these symptoms have a higher risk
of being diagnosed as dyslexic than other children. Some of these symptoms
are:
 | Delay in learning
to speak |
| Learns new words
slowly |
| Has difficulty
rhyming words, as in nursery rhymes |
| Late in
establishing a dominant hand |
- Early elementary
school-age children
| Difficulty learning
the alphabet |
| Difficulty with
associating sounds with the letters that represent them (sound-symbol
correspondence) |
| Difficulty
identifying or generating rhyming words, or counting syllables in words
|
| Difficulty
segmenting words into individual sounds, or blending sounds to make words
|
| Difficulty with
word retrieval or naming problems |
| Difficulty learning
to decode words |
| Confusion with
before/after, right/left, over/under, and so on |
| Difficulty
distinguishing between similar sounds in words; mixing up sounds in
multisyllable words (auditory discrimination) (for example, "aminal" for
animal, "bisghetti" for spaghetti) |
- Older elementary
school children
| Slow or inaccurate
reading |
| Very poor spelling
|
| Difficulty
associating individual words with their correct meanings |
| Difficulty with
time keeping and concept of time |
| Difficulty with
organization skills |
| Due to fear of
speaking incorrectly, some children become withdrawn and shy or become
bullies out of their inability to understand the social cues in their
environment |
| Difficulty
comprehending rapid instructions, following more than one command at a
time or remembering the sequence of things |
| Reversals of
letters (b for d) and a reversal of words (saw for was) are typical among
children who have dyslexia. Reversals are also common for children age 6
and younger who don't have dyslexia. But with dyslexia, the reversals
persist. |
| Children with
dyslexia may fail to see (and occasionally to hear) similarities and
differences in letters and words, may not recognize the spacing that
organizes letters into separate words, and may be unable to sound out the
pronunciation of an unfamiliar word. |
Diagnosis
Evaluation will
usually also include an IQ test to establish a profile of learning strengths
and weaknesses. While such "discrepancy" tests between full scale IQ and
reading level have, on their own, been shown to be flawed, the tests often
include interdisciplinary testing to exclude other possible causes for
reading difficulties, such as a more generalized cognitive impairment or
physical causes such as problems with vision or hearing.
Recent dyslexia
research using neuroimaging suggests that it may one day be possible to
identify children with dyslexia before they learn to read.
Currently, lack of
access to neuroimaging makes it impractical for diagnosing dyslexia;
however, there are testing instruments that can be used to assess the
specific manifestations of these neurobiological differences. These
instruments assess accurate and/or fluent word recognition, single real word
reading fluency, phonological processing, and for older students, spelling
deficits and general language competence. There are screening instruments
that can be used to identify children at high risk for dyslexia as young as
6 years of age.
See the
International
Dyslexia Association for more
information.
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