Ahissar et al.
Dyslexia and the failure to form a perceptual anchor
Reading appears to be primarily a visual task, but it has been proposed that children suffering from dyslexia may actually have in impairment in auditory processing. This study reports that a set of learning-disabled and dyslexic children had trouble with certain sound discrimination tasks, supporting the idea that the root of dyslexia could lie in auditory cognition.
Comments
There seems to be a general confusion about dyslexia and it's cause because of a lack of vocabulary that differentiates dyslexics by their symptoms. In much the same way people of the Arctic have many words that differentiate types of snow and use that information for travel, hunting and other uses, dyslexia needs to be broken down into defined subgroups that lead to different effective interventions based on those subgroups. A numerical scale for ranking the severity of impairment for each subgroup would also be useful as it appears dyslexic symptoms would vary in the different subgroups for any individual.
In an overly simplified analogy to fertilizers where 3 numbers indicate the amount of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus in order, such as 23-8-14 or 2-12-10, and the gardener knows which fertilizer ( intervention) to use for a particular plant problem I propose a similar system for dyslexics.
A 0-10 scale could be used where 0 indicates no effect on reading ability and 10 indicates the most severe effect on reading ability.
The order of the numbers would be
1) processing problems ( treated perhaps by multi-sensory instruction)
2) auditory problems ( treated perhaps by phonics instruction)
3) visual problems ( corrected by lenses )
In my analogy a dyslexic that was evaluated as 8-5-1 would likely benefit most from processing intervention followed by auditory intervention. This dyslexic would also be able to understand that 1 type of program very well might not be all he or she needs.
A dyslexic evaluated as 2-3-8 might only need visual correction.
I sell See Right Dyslexia Glasses at dyslexiaglasses.com that I claim remove the problems associated with visual dyslexia. I find the idea that there is 1 answer for all dyslexics to be hype and believe that all the evidence shows that there are many different types of dyslexia that respond to different interventions. I would argue that a primary step in dyslexia research is missing that evaluates a dyslexics problems as they relate to different interventions.
Posted by: John Hayes | December 4, 2006 11:03 AM