Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a learning disability that impairs a person's ability to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, and/or rapid naming. Dyslexia is separate and distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as a non-neurological deficiency with vision or hearing, or from poor or inadequate reading instruction. It is estimated that dyslexia affects between 5 and 17 percent of the population.

There are three proposed cognitive subtypes of dyslexia: auditory, visual and attentional. Although dyslexia is not an intellectual disability, it is considered both a learning disability and a reading disability. Dyslexia and IQ are not interrelated, since reading and cognition develop independently in individuals who have dyslexia.

Signs and symptoms

The symptoms of dyslexia vary according to the severity of the disorder as well as the age of the individual.

Preschool-aged children

It is difficult to obtain a certain diagnosis of dyslexia before a child begins school, but many dyslexic individuals have a history of difficulties that began well before kindergarten. Children who exhibit these symptoms early in life have a higher likelihood of being diagnosed as dyslexic than other children. These symptoms include:

delays in speech
slow learning of new words
not crawling[citation needed]
difficulty in rhyming words, as in nursery rhymes
low letter knowledge
letter reversal or mirror writing (for example, "??" instead of "R")

Early primary school children

Difficulty learning the alphabet or letters order
Difficulty with associating sounds with the letters that represent them (sound-symbol correspondence)
Difficulty identifying or generating rhyming words, or counting syllables in words[30] (phonological awareness)
Difficulty segmenting words into individual sounds, or blending sounds to make words[31] (phonemic awareness)
Difficulty with word retrieval or naming problems
Difficulty learning to decode written words
Difficulty distinguishing between similar sounds in words; mixing up sounds in polysyllabic words (auditory discrimination) (for example, "aminal" for animal, "bisghetti" for spaghetti)

Older primary school children

Slow or inaccurate reading (although these individuals can read to an extent).
Very poor spelling[35] which has been called dysorthographia (orthographic coding)
Difficulty reading out loud, reading words in the wrong order, skipping words and sometimes saying a word similar to another word (auditory processing disorder)
Difficulty associating individual words with their correct meanings
Difficulty with time keeping and concept of time when doing a certain task
Difficulty with organization skills (working memory)
Children with dyslexia may fail to see (and occasionally to hear) similarities and differences in letters and words, may not recognize the spacing that organizes letters into separate words, and may be unable to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word (auditory processing disorder).

Secondary school children and adults

Some dyslexics are able to disguise their weaknesses (even from themselves) and often do acceptably well - or better - at GCSE level (U.K. - at 16 years old). Many students reach higher education before they encounter the threshold at which they are no longer able to compensate for their learning weaknesses.

One common misconception about dyslexia is that dyslexic readers write words backwards or move letters around when reading. In fact, this only occurs in a very small population of dyslexic readers. Dyslexic people are better identified by writing that does not seem to match their level of intelligence from prior observations. Additionally, dyslexic people often substitute similar-looking, but unrelated, words in place of the ones intended (what/want, say/saw, help/held, run/fun, fell/fall, to/too, etc.).

Comorbidities

Several learning disabilities often occur with dyslexia, but it is unclear whether these learning disabilities share underlying neurological causes with dyslexia.[36] These disabilities include, but are not limited to:

Cluttering— a speech fluency disorder involving both the rate and rhythm of speech, resulting in impaired speech intelligibility. Speech is erratic and nonrhythmic, consisting of rapid and jerky spurts that usually involve faulty phrasing. The personality of people with cluttering bears striking resemblance to the personalities of those with learning disabilities.
Dysgraphia— a disorder which expresses itself primarily through writing or typing, although in some cases it may also affect eye–hand coordination direction or sequence oriented processes such as tying knots or carrying out a repetitive task. Dysgraphia is distinct from dyspraxia in that the person may have the word to be written or the proper order of steps in mind clearly, but carries the sequence out in the wrong order.
Dyscalculia— a neurological condition characterized by a problem with learning fundamentals and one or more of the basic numerical skills. Often people with this condition can understand very complex mathematical concepts and principles but have difficulty processing formulas or even basic addition and subtraction.