Imagine how a parent feels if, despite doing all the right things – such as buying them lots of children’s books and reading to them every night – their child struggles to learn to read when they start school. It can come as a total surprise since there might be no apparent reason why this should happen.
The child seems normal in every respect; they have a vast vocabulary and a good understanding of things explained or read to them, yet they find it hard to get into reading and writing. As time goes on at school, young readers start to lose confidence and think they will never learn to read and write. They may get grumpy, not want to attend school, and avoid reading and writing altogether. This is often the profile of a child with dyslexia.
In Part 3, we discussed two fundamental principles that make it possible to interpret dyslexia: The first is that there is nothing that any human being knows or can do that they have not learned. The second is that human learning is not a single level but a stratified process. One skill has to be acquired first, before it becomes possible to acquire subsequent skills. It is like climbing a ladder. If you miss one of the rungs, you fall off.
Language: The first rung of the reading ladder
Di dunia kini kita, tiap orang harus dapat membaca….
Unless one has first learned to speak Bahasa Indonesia, there is no way that one would be able to read the above Indonesian sentence.
This shows that language is at the very bottom of the reading ladder. Its role in reading can be compared to running in the game of soccer or ice skating in the game of ice hockey. One cannot play soccer if one cannot run, and one cannot play ice hockey if one cannot skate. One cannot read a book in a language – and least of all write – unless one knows the particular language.
The second rung is cognitive skills
While language skills comprise the first rung of the reading ladder, cognitive skills include the second. There is a whole conglomeration of cognitive skills foundational to reading and spelling.
Attention
Attention – or concentration – plays a critical role in learning. Focused attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. In contrast, sustained attention refers to the state in which attention must be maintained over time. Both are essential foundational skills of reading.
Because attention is so important for reading, ADHD and dyslexia commonly co-occur. Approximately 25 percent of children who are diagnosed with ADHD, a learning difficulty known to affect concentration, are also dyslexic.
Visual processing
Visual processing refers to the ability to make sense of information taken in through the eyes. This is different from problems involving sight or sharpness of vision. Difficulties with visual processing affect how visual information is interpreted or processed. A child with visual processing problems may have 20/20 vision but may have difficulties discriminating foreground from background, forms, size, and position in space. They may also be unable to synthesize and analyze.
- Foreground-background differentiation. The particular letter, word, or sentence the reader is focused on is elevated to the foreground level. In contrast, everything else within the field of vision of the reader (the rest of the page and the book, the desk on which the book is resting, the section of the floor and wall that is visible, etc.) is relegated to the background.
- Form discrimination. The most obvious classroom activity requiring the child to discriminate forms is that of reading. Learning the letters of the alphabet, syllables, and words will undoubtedly be impeded if there is difficulty in perceiving the form of the letters, syllables, and words.
- Size discrimination. Capital letters used at the start of a sentence sometimes look exactly the same as their lowercase counterparts and must, therefore, be discriminated with regard to size.
- Spatial relations refer to the position of objects in space. It also refers to the ability to perceive objects in space with reference to other objects accurately. A person with a spatial problem may find distinguishing letters like b, d, p, and q difficult.
- Synthesis and analysis. The reader must be able to perceive individual parts as a whole. In other words, they must be able to synthesize. Although the ability to analyze, i.e., to perceive the whole in its parts, does play a role in reading, this ability is of the utmost importance in spelling.
The terms visual dyslexia, dyseidetic dyslexia, surface dyslexia, and orthographic dyslexia are sometimes used to describe a person with dyslexia with difficulties in visual processing.
Auditory and phonological processing
On the other hand, auditory dyslexia, dysphonetic dyslexia, and phonological dyslexia are sometimes used to describe a dyslexic with difficulties in auditory or phonological processing.
Auditory processing refers to the ability to make sense of information taken in through the ears. It is not the ability to hear, but the ability to interpret, organise, or analyse what’s heard.
Problems with auditory perception generally correspond to those in the visual area and are presented under the following components:
- Auditory foreground-background differentiation. This refers to the ability to select and attend to relevant auditory stimuli and ignore the irrelevant.
- Auditory discrimination. This refers to the ability to hear similarities and differences between sounds.
- Auditory blending Also referred to as auditory analysis and synthesis, this is the ability to synthesize individual sounds which form a word. The child who manifests a difficulty in this area is unable to blend the individual sounds in a word, such as /c-a-t/. The child may know the individual phonemes but simply cannot put them together. Similarly, the child may have problems breaking apart an unknown word by syllables and blending it, such as /te-le-phone/.
refers to the ability to perceive individual sounds as a whole. The child who has a deficit in auditory blending will be unable to blend the individual sounds in a word. He may know the individual phonemes but simply cannot put them together. He may, for example, sound the letters “c-a-t” but then say “cold.”
Processing speed
Dyslexia has been linked to slow processing speed. Processing speed can be defined as how long it takes to get stuff done.
Researcher Hermundur Sigmundsson and his colleagues at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim gave two simulated driving tests to six dyslexic volunteers and 11 other people. The subjects were shown road signs as they drove at different speeds on simulated country and city roads.
The researchers found that people with dyslexia were 20 percent slower to react to traffic signs during the rural drive and 30 percent slower to respond in the city than the non-dyslexic controls.
In Part 5 we’ll discuss auditory, iconic, short-term, long-term and working memory, the other building blocks of reading and spelling.
Edublox offers cognitive training and live online tutoring to students with dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, and other learning disabilities. Our students are in the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. Book a free consultation to discuss your child’s learning needs.
Authored by Sue du Plessis (B.A. Hons Psychology; B.D.), an educational and reading specialist with 30+ years of experience in the learning disabilities field.
