If you are concerned that you or your child has dyslexia, one of the first places most people look for symptoms is the Internet. There is no doubt that the Internet has been a terrific source for information on this type of reading disorder, but if you look around, you will find evidence of many different signs, so why should this be so?
It is only in more recent years that dyslexia has become accepted in many schools, but even with the great advances that schools have made in this area, there are rarely enough available resources to cope sufficiently with this problem. One of the biggest problems with children and adult dyslexics is that the disorder is usually treated as a single all-encompassing entity. It is likely this is the primary reason for some of the inconsistencies in the reporting of symptoms of dyslexia and, in how well the remediation programs work.
There are a many possible symptoms that are related to dyslexia. However, consider now that everyone is an individual and when we do something, we all tend to do it in a different way. It therefore stands to reason that there will be individual differences in how dyslexia will manifest itself. There has been substantial evidence produced to support the idea of different sub-types of dyslexia, both developmental (from childhood) and acquired (i.e. as a result of brain trauma or disease). Although there are several reasons for dyslexia, the primary sub-types are known as phonological or surface dyslexia. Both of these sub-types exhibit symptoms of dyslexia that contrast each other.
The main issue for phonological dyslexics is the inability to segment individual sounds. In pure cases, they can be distinguished by their difficulty, or complete inability to read novel or made up words. In contrast, surface dyslexics have no problem with reading novel or made up words. However, they will have a difficulty in storing whole word representations, this leading to the decoding of many words by their individual sounds. Given the nature of English, there are many words that do not follow spelling-to-sound rules. For example, the word ‘yacht’ could produce ‘yatch’ for a surface dyslexic. Spelling is normally poor for all dyslexics and spelling errors will tend to show similar types of errors as with reading aloud. All types of dyslexics will be slower readers, and although adults may have compensate for their childhood problems, their slow reading speed will endure.
In summary, a basic distinction between the two pure types of dyslexia are that one will have difficulty reading novel words, while the other will have more problems in reading aloud words that do not follow the spelling-to-sound rules. Additionally, many people would be of a mixed sub-type of dyslexia. All this means is that they would exhibit difficulties with both processes. It is therefore suggested that the reason websites differ in their definitions of dyslexia is because of these different types.
Discover more about dyslexia screening and a test for dyslexia just follow the links.