From Parenting New Mexico November 1999

ARTICLE THREE OF FOUR ARTICLES ON
LEARNING DISABILITIES

Dyslexia:
The Reading
Disability

Of all learning disabilities, Dyslexia is the most prevalent. It affects ten percent or more of students. In the average school classroom there are two or three students who struggle with reading and associated tasks. Dyslexia is the single largest reason for student failure and academic distress in elementary school.

So what is Dyslexia? Foremost, it is a disorder of impaired language skills. However, as we will discuss later, it may also involve visual-spatial and memory problems. The dyslexic is most often challenged by manipulating the basic sound bits of words (called phonemes) and associating them with letters or letter combinations. This underlying difficulty in the linguistic processing of sounds and words results in labored word recognition, poor fluency in reading, and hindered comprehension. Dyslexics also frequently experience difficulties in spelling and writing, although spelling and written expression problems often occur when there is no difficulty with reading.

The source of reading problems is neurological. Dyslexia is not caused by laziness, low intelligence, inattention, psychological issues, or poor parenting. Reading problems run in families in a complex genetic pattern which scientists are still investigating. However, there are many reading disordered individuals with no family background for academic difficulties. Most of those without a family history of reading troubles had complications during their pregnancy or birth. We know that individuals with Dyslexia have brain structures which are slightly different from non-dyslexics. But then, all of us are neurologically constructed somewhat differently. Having Dyslexia or not is like variation in musical ability. Many people grasp music easily and fluently, and then there are those who struggle to carry a tune, dance, or remember "The Star Spangled Banner." Some of us are born musically impaired and others of us come out challenged by reading.

Dyslexics are often very skilled in areas other than reading: music, art, drama, math, social skills, athletics, or mechanical abilities. Read a biography of Thomas Edison - now there was a child with a case of Dyslexia.

With appropriate intervention (the topic of next month's article), the prognosis for the vast majority of dyslexics is quite good. While struggling in the early grades, most become effective readers, although often reading slower and more labored than their peers. Spelling problems, however, are notorious for continuation in adulthood (dyslexics worship their computer spell checker!). A great concern regarding young troubled readers is the negative effect of poor reading on self esteem and motivation to succeed in school. It is well documented that Dyslexia is a major factor among students who drop out of school or become delinquent. Early reading help is one the best prevention methods for reducing teenage problems of all sorts.

The Reading Process

To understand where and how a dyslexic struggles with reading, and often also with spelling and writing, it is necessary to know the many skills involved. To read even single words is a very complex process calling on a myriad of neurological skills and interactions.

It Doesn't Come Naturally. Expose the average infant to speech and he or she will begin to speak. Not so with reading. Reading must be taught for the majority of us; it just doesn't come merely by being read to or seeing books. Most children must be taught the letters, the sounds which go with each letter, and how to combine sounds represented by letters to say words from the written page.

Oral Language Skills. Good language abilities (speaking and listening) are a necessary foundation to reading. Children must have a sound base of vocabulary (both expressive and receptive) and be adept at using the standard rules of grammar. A child with poor articulation of speech (trouble pronouncing sounds correctly) is at some disadvantage, but not nearly to the extent of a child with weak skills in the rules of language or with a deficient vocabulary.

Visual-Spatial Abilities. From a neurological perspective, the shapes of letters and words are very complex. To perceive letters and words correctly requires well developed visual perception skills. Any person who can't rapidly analyze complex figures will have trouble reading (for example, the classic confusion between b and d, and q and p). Children with laterality delays (slowness in developing a clear hand preference and in being able to tell left from right) often have visual perceptual problems.

In addition to visual perception skills, writing requires integration with motor skills. And the process doesn't stop with being able to form the letters; margins and word spacings must be also considered constantly. For someone with poor visual-motor integration, the mechanics of writing can be very overwhelming. For this reason, I assess writing both with a sample of handwritten work and on a computer word processor. Many children, even elementary students, produce better grammar and richer content on the computer. They seem aided by the computer removing the burden of forming the letters, standardizing spacing, and tracking margins. As a third grade boy sitting at the computer happily said to me, "I don't have to remember to put a pinky-size space after every period and two fingers wide down the side of the page."

Phoneme Awareness. Words are made up of sound bits (phonemes). Figuring out words (decoding them) requires adeptness at grasping the phonemic make up of words. For example, a child must be able to easily understand that the words "tap" and "pat" have exactly the same phonemes, just in a different order, and that the word "drive" becomes "dive" if the r sound is removed.

Phonics. Once a child has mastered phoneme awareness the next step in the reading process is to associate phonemes with particular letters or letter combinations. This is phonics; the knowledge, for example, that an "o" is pronounced as "ah" (as in "cop") unless the word ends in an e at which time the pronunciation changes to "oo" (as in "cope").

Auditory Processing. To effectively use phonics, the subtly different sounds of words must be easily told apart (auditory discrimination). A child must be able to very accurately distinguish in both listening and speaking between the similar beginning sounds of words like: hair, bear, and fair. For some children this is a problem which to master requires further maturation or speech and language therapy.

The use of phonics also requires that the sounds of words must be remembered so that they can be combined to make whole words. A common reading problem is being able to make the individual sounds of a word (like d-i-s-l-e-x-see-aa) and then not being able to recall them in order to blend them into the whole word. This type of memory is called auditory sequential memory.

Visual Memory. With a strong grasp of phonics a reader can read, especially orally, over seventy percent of the words in a typical newspaper. The remainder of the words, however, can't be decoded phonetically. Take the word "enough" - the rules of phonics just don't work. These words have to be learned as "sight words," that is see 'em and know 'em. This is the reading method known as The Whole Word approach. For fast readers, words that once required phonetic decoding become learned as sight words. Sight words use visual sequential memory, the memory for visual things in a particular order. Good spellers have excellent visual sequential memory. They report being able to simply visualize in their mind the order of the letters in complex words.

Comprehension. Reading is not simply about being able to recognize and pronounce individual words. Words come in sentences and paragraphs which have meaning. Being able to grasp the meaning of sentences and paragraphs involves the integration of word decoding skills, auditory sequential memory, complex oral language abilities, and the use of contextual clues. Contextual clues are those things around a particular sentence or phrase that help lead you to meaning, such as pictures, titles, and words and phrases in surrounding sentences. Many readers who stumble through reading are stunning with what meaning they actually obtain; they're masters at using context to figure out what a paragraph actually says.

Dyslexia Through Life

Dyslexia tends to be most obvious in the elementary grades when students are learning to read. However, there are symptoms of dyslexia which appear throughout life. Of course, these are highly dependent on how severe the reading disorder is for a particular individual. Some of the characteristics of dyslexics at different ages are:

Preschool

• delays in language development
• difficulty recognizing and producing rhymes
• trouble remembering rote information (home address, for example)
• difficulty remembering directions with more than one step

Grades 1-3

• difficulty learning sound to letter correspondences
• confusion of visually similar letters (b/d/p, w/m/n/, h/n, and f/t)
• confusion of auditorily similar letters (d/t, b/p, f/v)
• problems segmenting words into sounds and blending sounds into words
• difficulty remembering and applying spelling rules

Grades 4-8

• trouble using word structures like root words, prefixes, suffixes
• problems reading and spelling longer words, often
  omitting syllables
• frequently misreading common sight words
  (where/there, then/when)
• slow, labored reading
• sounding out even simple words (often lips move
  during silent reading)

High School and Adult Years

• slow, inefficient reading
• very poor spelling and frequent grammar errors in writing
• difficulty taking notes in class
• struggling with foreign languages study

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Dr. Zieman is an Albuquerque psychologist who specializes in the evaluation of child and adolescent disorders. He also works with people having ADHD.

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Learning Disability Articles
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4

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Copyright by Parenting New Mexico and Gayle L Zieman PhD. This article may not be published in part or in its entirety in any medium without written permission from Gayle L Zieman PhD or Parenting New Mexico magazine. Links to this page are welcome.