Dyslexia

Dyslexia is more than just mixing up letters and words according to this New York Times article published August 1, 2011.  Written by: Pam Belluck

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that people with dyslexia have more trouble recognizing voices than those without dyslexia.


This research shows that normal reading involves a “circuit, the ability to have all of those components integrated absolutely automatically,” said Maryanne Wolf, a dyslexia expert at Tufts University. “One of the great weaknesses in dyslexia is that the system is not able to integrate these phoneme-driven systems” with other aspects of language comprehension.


If a teacher asked, “ ‘Oh, Sally, what is the capital of  Nova Scotia?,’ Sally will go, ‘Um, um, um,’ and the teacher will say, ‘Oh, gee, you don’t know it,’  Dr. Sally Shaywitz, a director of the Center for Dyslexia and Creativity at Yale University, said. “It’s more likely to be a problem of word retrieval than knowledge. If she reframes it as, ‘Is the capital Halifax or Charlottetown?,’ Sally is more likely to answer correctly.”

Read Full Article Here:   http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/health/research/02dyslexia.html?_r=2