Many years ago educators and medical practitioners believed that dyslexia was a case of “word blindness”. This was especially evident when such children were asked to track a sequence of written words with their eyes and were often found going back and forth over the same sequence. This was in contrast to children who read normally and who tracked the string of words smoothly.
Month: July 2017
Dyslexia: The Alphabetic Stage Develops Layer by Layer in a Child
Is the ability to recognize the letters of the alphabet the essence of the alphabetic stage? Letters, sometimes called graphemes, are made-up of different parts or have features that are combined to form individual letters which are then translated into sounds or phonemes. This is the same as learning grapheme-phoneme correspondence. It is a must, and is a natural beginning for the alphabetic stage, but there are several layers of development within this stage.
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Dyslexia: How Does the Child Learn to Read?
There is no doubt that reading is a very complex process. Although it is generally not recognized as a complex system of tasks, it is so for a child learning to read. Anyone with a child who appears to be intelligent, but fails to learn to read, will immediately understand just how complex reading skills are. While speaking is natural and spontaneous, reading has to be taught.
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Dyslexia: Different Kinds of Reading Disabilities
What are the different skills that we require for reading? Clearly, the major one is to translate spelling to sound, the phonological coding skill. Given a meaningless word, why does it take longer to read than a real word? Is it because searching for and not finding the word’s meaning takes more time? This is certainly a veiy likely explanation and we can argue that the ultimate purpose of reading is not simply pronouncing what is written, but to understand its meaning.
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Dyslexia: Reading, Speech and the Child’s Brain
The ability to put letters together and sound them out depends on the ability to represent the sounds in one’s own internal speech. This is why phonological coding is essentially concerned with how children can represent not only the sounds they hear, but also the sounds as they are associated with letters and words. We are not going to discuss in any detail the various aspects of how children perceive speech, how they do phonological coding, and, ultimately, how they produce spoken responses.
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Dyslexia: How to Measure Intelligence – American IQ Tests
Intelligence can be measured by tests. At the beginning of this century in Paris, Alfred Binet developed the first set of such tests to find out which children in school needed special attention. So, at the beginning, intelligence tests were mainly used to separate the dull children in school from the average or bright children so that they could receive special education; they were not meant to be free of cultural bias or academic content .
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Dyslexia: What is Intelligence All About?
There are many children who are intelligent but cannot read. We identify some of them as having dyslexia. Indeed, IQ, the popular indication of intelligence, does not predict dyslexia. Many children at all levels of IQ fail to learn to read adequately in spite of getting the same instruction in the classroom as their classmates. That some children with a normal IQ of 100 or better do not learn to read is evidence enough for saying that IQ is not very relevant when explaining or predicting reading disability.
Dyslexia: The PASS Theory of Intelligence – An Alternative to IQ
The PASS (Planning, Arousal-Attention, Simultaneous, Successive) cognitive processing model can be described as a modern theory.
It is concerned with information processing that is dynamic as opposed to static. It is based on Luria’s analyses of brain structures (Luria, 1966b, 1973). Luria was a Russian neuropsychologist and medical doctor who examined many patients suffering from brain damage. He worked for 50 years in this field and died in 1977.
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Dyslexia: Criticisms of IQ Tests
Testing intelligence by standard tests has come under attack in the last 15 years. At least three criticisms of intelligence testing have been voiced. First, intelligence tests measure ability and give us an IQ score, but do not show the processes of thinking which determine that ability. Intelligence tests consist of problems to be solved and different persons may solve them by using different processes. One procedure of solving the problem ends in success, another procedure ends in failure.
Dyslexia: What is Involved in Comprehension?
How do We Understand What We Understand?
It took reading specialists many years to realize that understanding what you read and reading itself require two different processes. There are children who can read but cannot understand, and there are children who cannot read well because of some problem with speech but who, nevertheless, can understand through silent reading.
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