Dyslexia: Definition, Symptoms and Treatment

Dyslexia is a neurological disorder that affects reading skills. It is the most common learning disability, affecting anywhere from 2 to 10 percent of the population. It can impact any aspect of reading, including the ability to read accurately, fluently and with comprehension. Although there is no cure for dyslexia, there are many strategies that can help people with dyslexia improve their reading skills. In this blog post, we will explore the definition of dyslexia, symptoms and treatment options for this condition. We will also discuss how parents and educators can support children with dyslexia in their academic pursuits.

What Is Dyslexia?

In this article, we will talk about what Dyslexia is and its symptoms. Dyslexia is a learning disorder involving reading difficulties due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how letters and words are related (decoding). Dyslexia, also known as reading disability, affects areas of the brain which process language.

It is a reading disorder that makes it hard for people to read and understand what they read. This disorder affects different people in different ways, but there are some common signs: slow reading speed, poor spelling and comprehension skills, difficulty with written expression, especially when trying to write from dictation. People who have dyslexia often also have trouble remembering sounds of letters or words or putting them together into words. 

It’s not always easy to recognize the signs of this disorder because children may compensate for their difficulties by memorizing how to spell many commonly used words. But if you notice these symptoms in your child over time, he/she could benefit from being evaluated by a professional psychologist. The evaluation will help identify any possible symptoms of this disorder.

Symptoms of Dyslexia

Reading Stamina

• Not being able to read over long periods of time (age of 9-11 and 12+)
• Feeling tired after reading even a short paragraph (age of 9-11 and 12+)
• Reading the same page over and over (age of 9-11 and 12+)
• Reading slowly (age of 9-11 and 12+)

Attitude Towards Reading

• Resistance against reading (age of 5-8, 9-11 and 12+)
• Not getting satisfied while reading (age of 9-11 and12+)
• Not liking a book without pictures ( age of 5-8 )
• Feeling stressed while reading or doing homework (age of 9-11 and 12+)

Phonological Awareness

• Not pronouncing unknown words (age of 5-8)
• Guessing or skipping words while reading (age of 5-8)
• A dislike of reading aloud (age of 5-8)
• Reversing letters while writing. (age of 5-8)

Perception

• Having problems in understanding the meaning behind the text (age of 9-11)
• Not understanding the main idea of the text (12+)
• Unable to chose an answer in tests with multiple choice questions (12+)
• Not being able to keep the information on mind without experiencing it (age of 9-11 and 12+)
• Having troubles making inferences from the text. (age of 9-11 and 12+)

Fluency

• Not paying attention to punctuation. (5-8)
• Slow and choppy loud reading (5-8 and 9-11)
• Wanting to read easier books (5-8 and 9-11)
• Eye tracking issues (5-8 and 9-11)

Language

• Limited Vocabulary . (3-4)
• Having difficulties in multi step-instructions (3-4 and 5-8)
• Slow responses (5-8)
• Spelling incorrectly (5-8)
• Not participating in group discussions (3-4 and 5-8)

Characteristics of Dyslexia:

The common issue in dyslexia is a deficit of phonological awareness, or the ability to perceive how sounds are associated with letters. In most European languages, however, it is problems with alphabet writing systems that have a phonetic construction that cause this type of disability.

For example, problems with speaking in full sentences, articulating Rs and Ls properly as well as Ms and Ns, mixing up sounds in multi-syllabic words, and immature speech such as “wed and gween” rather than “red and green.” (ex: aminal for animal, spahgetti for spaghetti, heilcopter for helicopter, hangaberg for hamburger, ageen for magazine, etc.)

The tendencies of dyslexia have been mostly researched in languages with alphabetic writing systems, such as English. However, many of these features may be translatable to other kinds of writing systems.

The precise causes of dyslexia are unclear, although neuroscientists believe that it is a phonological processing problem and that people with dyslexia have reading difficulties because they are unable to see or hear a word, break it down to discrete sounds, and then associate each sound with letters that make up the word. According to certain researchers, a portion of dyslexics have visual impairments in addition to phoneme processing difficulties. In any case, there is no evidence that dyslexics see letters backward or in reverse order within words. Dyslexia is not a vision problem; it’s a language disorder.

Another possible cause of forgetting new vocabulary words in persons with dyslexia may be a lack of working memory. It’s possible that remembering verbal instructions is difficult. Individuals who are learning English as a second language (ESL) and have not received structured language instruction may develop a dependence on memorizing individual words rather than decoding words by mapping phonemes (speech sounds) to graphemes (letters and letter combinations that represent individual speech sounds).

Diagnosis:

Dyslexia is a neurological disorder that affects reading skills. It can be diagnosed through a series of tests that measure language processing, phonology, and orthography skills.

Most dyslexia diagnoses are made in kindergarten or first grade, but it’s not uncommon for children to be diagnosed as late as third grade. The earlier a child is diagnosed with dyslexia, the more help they can receive to improve their reading skills.

Causes:

Dyslexia is caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Genes that have been linked to dyslexia include those that control certain aspects of brain development and function.

Environmental factors that may play a role in causing dyslexia include exposure to certain chemicals, such as lead, during fetal development; inadequate educational opportunities; and traumatic brain injuries.

Both functional and structural differences in the brains of children with reading difficulties have been linked to neuroimaging technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET). In people with dyslexia, the left hemisphere of the brain, which controls reading, is less active than usual. The inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule, and middle and ventral temporal cortex are three areas that have shown decreased electrical activity in individuals with dyslexia.

Twin studies have been used to examine the role of gene–environment interaction in reading disability, which estimate the proportion of variation attributable to a person’s environment and the proportion due to their genes. Environmental and genetic factors appear to influence reading development. The effect of environmental variables such as parental education and teaching quality has been shown that genetics have a stronger impact in encouraging, rather than inhibiting, environments. However, better circumstances will only allow genetic risk factors to account for a larger proportion of the variation in outcome since environmental risk factors have been reduced.

The orthographic complexity of a language influences how difficult it is to learn to read it. Within the Latin alphabet writing system, English and French have relatively “deep” phonemic orthographies, with complicated structures employing spelling systems on several levels: letter-sound correspondence, syllables, and morphemes. People with dyslexia may learn Spanish, Italian, and Finnish easily since they employ letter-sound correspondence—also known as “shallow” orthographies—which makes them more accessible. Although logographic writing systems, such as Chinese characters, have a lot of symbol usage, they also present difficulties for dyslexic readers.

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Also read: 14 Anxiety Disorders In Children

Last Updated on December 12, 2022 by Lucas Berg