Dyslexia is a disorder of the higher psyche, which manifests itself in difficulties during learning to read and write while maintaining the general ability to learn.
The content of the article:
Causes of dyslexia
Mechanisms of dyslexia development
Classification of dyslexia
Symptoms of dyslexia
Diagnosis of the disease
Dyslexia correction
Prognosis and ways to prevent the disease
Dyslexia
Dyslexia is one of the most common abnormalities in children. It is diagnosed in 5-8% of students. At the same time, it occurs much more often in boys than in girls. The disease can have different degrees of severity. The earlier the disease is diagnosed and its treatment is prescribed, the better results can be achieved. However, you can start developing your speech abilities at any age.
Children suffering from dyslexia find it difficult to read, they are difficult to learn. The reason for the occurrence of this disorder lies in the failures of some brain functions, for example, in the transmission of an image as a visual image to the information that a person perceives. Dyslexia is not a consequence of hearing or vision pathology. It is also not associated with dementia.
Dyslexia is rarely found in preschool age. During classes, a child may experience fear that he will not be able to learn to read, which only worsens dyslexia. Treatment of such children, not carried out on time, can cause the development of neurosis and a decrease in self-esteem. Then the child’s behavior at home and in an educational institution becomes inadequate. If you do not engage in treatment, then serious learning problems may arise.
Causes of dyslexia
After numerous experiments, scientists have proved that dyslexia is caused by neurobiological causes. In people suffering from this pathology, the convolutions of the brain are insufficiently active when compared with the indicators of healthy children. There are also disorders in the structure of brain tissue, the density of brain tissue on the left is reduced.
The causes of dyslexia may be hereditary. When the DCDC gene of the 6th chromosome is modified, the development of some parts of the brain worsens, which causes dyslexia.
Dyslexia can also develop in children who do not know how to listen to what they read or who were not taught to read at an early age. All this entails a weak connection between the nerve cells of the brain responsible for speech.
Sometimes head injuries lead to dyslexia.
Mechanisms of dyslexia development
The formation of writing and reading is a complex procedure. In total , 4 analyzers take part in it:
speech motor — responsible for articulation;
recheslukhovoy — helps a person to choose a suitable phoneme;
visual — helps a person to choose a suitable grapheme;
motor — translates grapheme into kineme.
All these actions are performed in the precentral gyrus of the brain, and development is completed by the age of 10-11.
The letter must be accompanied by some motive. The cerebral cortex located in the frontal part is responsible for this process.
Based on all this, it can be understood that reading and writing are multi—level work. This means that only with the well-coordinated work of the analyzers and the integrity of the brain structures, the child will be able to fully write and read.
If a person has serious disorders in at least one of the receptors (hearing, vision), then you will have to go through complex training schemes. With such training, the abilities of other analyzers are more widely used.
Not many people know that a person has 3 types of hearing. The first type includes physical hearing. It gives us the opportunity to distinguish the rustle of leaves, the sound of water or the crunch of snow under our feet.
The second one is musical. It is with its help that a person can enjoy the music that he likes.
The third type is speech hearing. Some people are endowed with impeccable musical and physical hearing, but at the same time have mediocre speech. With the help of speech hearing, a person can catch the subtlest shades of spoken words, distinguish one sound from another. If this type of hearing is poorly developed, a person cannot distinguish similar consonances, as a result of which the words spoken by the interlocutor are perceived distorted.
Children with speech hearing pathology cannot read and write normally. After all, a child is not able to read correctly if he hears speech not clearly enough. He is not able to learn how to spell words correctly, because he does not know the meaning of the letters. The task also becomes difficult because when a child writes, he must also catch the right sound in order to write it in the form of a sign (letter). For this reason, it is quite difficult to teach children with hearing impairments.
In addition to speech hearing, people also have special vision for letters. This means that it is not enough for a person to write just to see what surrounds him. He must also have sight for letters in order to memorize and reproduce their outlines.
Classification of dyslexia
Based on the main manifestations, dyslexia can be divided into verbal (in which it is difficult for a child to read words) and alphabetic (in which a child cannot learn some letters). According to the type of disorders dyslexia happens:
agrammatic — occurs as a result of insufficient development of functional and linguistic generalizations, grammatical structure of the sentence;
semantic — occurs due to impaired perception of syllables, inability to make out combinations of words in speech, poor vocabulary;
phonemic — occurs due to the inability to parse speech sounds, analysis and synthesis;
tactile — occurs due to a violation of tactile perception in people with visual pathology;
mnestic — is associated with defects in speech memory and the inability to match sounds and letters;
optical — develops as a result of an unformed visual-spatial representation.
At the same time, the first three forms of dyslexia appear due to different speech functions that are not fully formed, and the rest are due to undeveloped mental capabilities.
Symptoms of dyslexia
In most cases, a child’s dyslexia is not detected until he starts school or goes to kindergarten, where he begins to learn letters. The examination may be necessary for children who started talking late and do not “catch up” with peers at the end of the first degree of study, who do not read as expected from them, based on their mental abilities. The main reason for the diagnosis is a non-standard approach to reading at the initial stage of training. Although a wide variety of approaches to reading may be present in children at this stage.
Problems with phonological processing may serve as the basis for the diagnosis.
Children who are suspected of dyslexia must pass a test for the ability to read, the degree of development of speech, hearing, cognitive abilities and a psychological examination to select the most suitable training program for the child. Usually teachers or parents detect dyslexia, diagnosis and examination can be carried out at their request.
After conducting an assessment on the understanding of the read text, the doctor will be able to determine how the child analyzes and recognizes words, how he speaks, whether he understands the speech being listened to.
Thanks to the test for the pronunciation of words and the perception of text by ear, the speech therapist will be able to determine the level of spoken speech, detect failures in the perception of sounds. In the process of diagnosis, the doctor also evaluates active and passive speech, cognitive abilities.
During the examination, the speech therapist will identify psychological moments that can aggravate the disorder. In some cases, you may need a family history. It is necessary in order to identify whether the child’s relatives had mental disorders and, if so, which ones.
In addition, the doctor should conduct a vision and hearing test. If you suspect neurological disorders, you may need to consult a neurologist.
Diagnosis of the disease
In most cases, a child’s dyslexia is not detected until he starts school or goes to kindergarten, where he begins to learn letters. The examination may be necessary for children who started talking late and do not “catch up” with peers at the end of the first degree of study, who do not read as expected from them, based on their mental abilities. The main reason for the diagnosis is a non-standard approach to reading at the initial stage of training. Although a wide variety of approaches to reading may be present in children at this stage.
Problems with phonological processing may serve as the basis for the diagnosis.
Children who are suspected of dyslexia must pass a test for the ability to read, the degree of development of speech, hearing, cognitive abilities and a psychological examination to select the most suitable training program for the child. Usually teachers or parents detect dyslexia, diagnosis and examination can be carried out at their request.
After conducting an assessment on the understanding of the read text, the doctor will be able to determine how the child analyzes and recognizes words, how he speaks, whether he understands the speech being listened to.
Thanks to the test for the pronunciation of words and the perception of text by ear, the speech therapist will be able to determine the level of spoken speech, detect failures in the perception of sounds. In the process of diagnosis, the doctor also evaluates active and passive speech, cognitive abilities.
During the examination, the speech therapist will identify psychological moments that can aggravate the disorder. In some cases, you may need a family history. It is necessary in order to identify whether the child’s relatives had mental disorders and, if so, which ones.
In addition, the doctor should conduct a vision and hearing test. If you suspect neurological disorders, you may need to consult a neurologist.
Dyslexia correction
And although dyslexia will accompany a person throughout life, some children still manage to master the skills of functional reading. Unfortunately, some of them do not reach the necessary degree of literacy.
The elimination of dyslexia consists in changing the method of teaching, including direct and indirect learning to recognize words and the ability to distinguish individual parts of a word. In direct learning, special phonetic methods are used separately from reading instruction. In one case, the child is taught to read by words or phrases, in another, a hierarchy of acquired knowledge is used: first from reading by syllables, then by words and by sentences. In addition, it is recommended to influence different sensory organs, learn new words and combine visual, tactile and auditory sensations to study words, sounds and sentences.
You may also need to learn how to isolate the parts that make up a word, combine different sounds to create words, break words into syllables, determine the location of a certain sound in a word.
It is also important to teach the child to understand the meaning of the text and its individual paragraphs, to determine the main idea of the text, to learn to draw conclusions from what he has read.
It is recommended to use a computer to teach children. This is necessary to highlight fragments in the text or individual parts of the word.
At the moment, Ronald’s dyslexia correction is widely used. D. Davis, the essence of which is to put a figurative expression into written words and letters and memorize it. So, it is possible to eliminate gaps in perception.
Prognosis and ways to prevent the disease
Prevention of dyslexia consists in following the following measures:
prevention of fetal abnormalities, prevention of complications during pregnancy, prevention of injury to the baby during childbirth, infection of the fetus or newborn;
prevention of infectious diseases in the first months of a child’s life;
timely recognition and therapy of cerebral pathology;
familiarization with the basics of reading at the age of 5-7;
reading to a child at night and reading together;
encouraging the child to acquire any new skills;
educational games during which the child will be able to work with words and sounds;
working with socially disadvantaged families, conducting conversations with children who do not attend kindergarten or school.
The prognosis of the disease is generally good. With timely recognition and treatment, significant results can be achieved in the correction of dyslexia.
