What is Dyslexia - Causes, Symptoms and Treatment?

Dyslexia is also commonly known as reading disorder. Dyslexia affects 5 to 10% of school-aged children. Early detection and individual rehabilitation (pre-reading) or specialized classes should allow the child to be reintegrated into normal schooling. Difficulties in reading and spelling are the most frequent expression of school difficulties and can be seen from the beginning of the preparatory course. Dyslexia is a condition that makes the child unable, despite his experience in the traditional classroom, to acquire the language skills that would enable him to learn to read, write and speak orally. The child is however normally intelligent and does not suffer from any auditory or visual deficit. A dysorthographia often succeeds dyslexia. Dysorthography is the term which refers to spelling errors that follow dyslexia. It manifests itself not by the ignorance of a grammatical rule but by the difficulty or impossibility of considering the sentence as an organized whole. Screening for dyslexia should be early in around 4 or 5 years of age after which speech therapy is needed. It is also important to eliminate reading or language difficulties due to other reasons before suspecting dyslexia. Some of these reasons include hearing problems, sight disorders, speech problems, an intellectual deficit, disinterest due to emotional issues, bilingualism and more.

Signs and Symptoms of Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a language and writing disorder that persists beyond the normal age of speech learning. In many cases, the grasp of language is also delayed. The pronunciation of the words, association of several sounds designating a person or an object begins in the 2nd year; after which language, a combination of meaningful words, is obtained around by four and half year olds. A first speech examination at this age should highlight the persistent distortion of words, poorly constructed sentences or the inability to remember sentences. Most often, dyslexia is discovered during the assessment of a failure in school. In Dyslexia the child gets confused with some letters and their shapes that are near similar both written or phonetically, for instance hippopotamus will become hippopapam for a child suffering from Dyslexia. These confusions are not systematized and depending on the moment, the child can read correctly or substitute a letter for another letter. Thus many a times the reading is choppy, hesitant and incomprehensible and the child does not succeed in transforming written symbols into phonemes.

Causes of Dyslexia

Issues in the family history are common in children affected by Dyslexia. Also there are many other theories floated by experts on probable cause of Dyslexia. Some experts also classify Dyslexia or the cause of Dyslexia as a psycho-emotional disorder caused due to lack of proper attention and assistance to the child. Dyslexia or Dyslexia-like symptoms in children may also be caused by external factors or reasons which include a minor lesion of brain function; improper reading learning methods; an unfavorable socio-cultural and economic environment; progress of language acquisitions not being respected in initial stages and more. Many experts may or may not classify these conditions as Dyslexia. But the term dyslexia-dysorthography is exclusively reserved for isolated reading and spelling disorder outside the ambit of these external factors. Dyslexia is often accompanied by other disorders such as emotional disorders, aggression or passivity in the face of failure at school, ocular motility disorder, spatial orientation disorder; temporal orientation disorder and more.

Dyslexia Cure and Treatment

Different therapies formulated by experts are useful in the rehabilitation process, psychotherapy is also often helpful. In some these therapies the experts in collaboration with the parents may use stimuli of human voice or music recorded for stimulation of coordination of the respective roles of each hemisphere of the brain by giving the same information to the two ears with different filters and grapho-auditory stimulations. Team exercises, dictations, recitations, reading also form part of various therapies. Some other methods include letting the child express himself in writing, and in stopping him with each error to dictate to him on a rhythmic mode a succession of words related to the erroneous word. Support from parents and teachers is utmost important to deal with a child suffering from Dyslexia.