Dyslexia (English)

Dyslexia: Signs and symptoms,emotional impact and treatment

In 1896 as Dr. W. Pringle Morgan described his encounters with dyslexia he wrote: “Percy F., age 14, has always been a brightand intelligent boy, quick at games and in no way inferior to others of his age. His great difficulty has been; and is now his inability to learn to read.” Identified by Oswald Berkhan in 1881 as alearning disability which creates difficulty to process linguistic and symbolic codes, dyslexia is very much present in today’s society. The term coined six years later by Rudolph Berlin comes to us fromthe Greek words: dys (meaning poor or inadequate) and lexis (words or language). Although it does not reflect an overall defect in language, it does however affect the functional part of the brainwhere the sounds of language are put together to form words and where words are broken down and formed into sounds. It is not a result of neurological damage but the product of neurological development.Also recent studies have identified a number of genes that may predispose an individual to developing dyslexia, meaning that it may be a hereditary condition.

The understanding of dyslexia hasevolved with each generation of researchers while enhancing one or more older theories of what causes it. Of people with poor reading skills, 70-80% are likely dyslexic and the percentage of males andfemales suffering from dyslexia are virtually the same. It does not discriminate with socioeconomic or ethnic backgrounds as it is evenly spread out among the population. It should be noted that it isless common in transparent languages such as Spanish. This means that letters and sounds have a more predictable correlation i.e. when you see the letter ‘a’ in a word from a transparent language youknow what sound it makes while in English the letter ‘a’ makes 5 different sounds therefore there are more children with reading and spelling difficulties in English. Symptoms of dyslexia include:...