Audition
- Audition is a broad area of processing. Audition is how the brain makes sense of the sounds it receives from the ears.
- Speech sounds can differ due to duration, pitch, loudness (vowels are louder), stress syllables
- Auditory perception is not one thing
Vision
- Visual part is not typically the primary cause of dyslexia
- Motion perception/ eye movement problems
- Visual stress - seeing highly contrasting visual images - providing special glasses or coloured overlays that seem to reduce visual stress.Research evidence is mixed for these solutions.
- Magnocellular theory - - evidence also mixed - cause or effect?
- Visual attention - the brain is deciding what to attend to. May find it easier to read a smaller window of text - may be better for some people.
Attention
- Attention can be hyperactive or inattentive
- If attention is not on instruction, can miss vital parts of instruction
- May take approximate approach to reading - eg may miss words, change small words
- If child has decoding issue, find reading frustrating - may show similar patterns
- Different causes can cause similar behaviours - or can be an issue with both!
- Children with a more primary reading issues tend to have bigger phonological issues.
- If you read comprehension questions to a child with dyslexia, they can sometimes perform better without demands of decoding. Children with attention issues may show the reverse.
- Do attention issues only occur at reading time?
Maths
- Up to 60% of dyslexic children have issues with maths
- A lot of rote learning in maths - difficult for those with dyslexic tendencies
- Then don't have the foundations on which to build
- Dyslexics can have issues with sequencing - challenge in maths
- Focus on concepts rather than rote learning can help
- Symbols can look very similar to dyslexic people
- Word problems - different words used. Abstract, relational terms
- Need to instil competence in early years
Dyspraxia
- Difficulties in motor control, automatisms and spacial temporal organisation.
- Difficulty in dressing, coordinate hands and legs to ride a bike, tie shoelaces etc
- Appear to be clumsy
- difficulty in reading time
- Computer is useful because they find it hard to hold a pencil
- Verbal intelligence is normal, sometimes superior
- Visual/Spacial ability problematic
- Difficulty with geometory - adaption - ask them to explain problem and you write or use app
- Use computer as early as eight.
- Often goes hand in hand with dycalcula
Oral Language Impairment
- Phonemes often fuzzier
- Non-dyslexic learners ignore unimportant variations while dyslexic learners tend to notice them - although this is controversial.
- Difficulties in identifying fast temporal changes in oral language
- Specific Language Impairment often comes with dyslexia.
Psychological Effects
- Need more effort to succeed and not rewarded with results
- Anxiety and depression
- Can have a significant impact on the justice system
- Need self-esteem to learn
- Self-perception if negative difficult to deal with difficulties
- Teacher has central role to recognise all children at school
- Dyslexic child who experiences failure at school can develop four types of behviour:
- Inhibition
- Regression - requires attention, doesn't think by themselves
- Projection - tries to ignore difficulties but will notice them in others and make fun of them, perhps violence
- Displacement - get validation in other domains
- Results often do not match the huge efAdvantage that dyslefort put in
- Teachers must make sure they recognise the other abilities of these children
Positive Aspects
- People with dyslexia can excel often in eg visualising things in 3D space
- Dyslexics have more of their brain for visual information
- Professions where dyslexics excel - architect, engineer, designer, TV presenter, poet, singer, entrepreneur, salesperson
Pros and Cons of Labelling
- Advantages - relief to put a word on something; some countries will allow adaptations at school
- Disadvantages - sometimes child will give up; in some school systems then can get packaged intervention which doesn't always help; labels easy to give, hard to take away
