Many people have no idea what dyslexia is. But there are those who are familiar with this specific violation, which is expressed in the inability to master reading skills. Dyslexia in children is manifested in persistent errors caused by the disorder or lack of psychological functions that are responsible for the reading process. The violation can be acquired or congenital, observed in children with intellectual disability and in children with completely normal intelligence. What is dyslexia, its causes, symptoms, varieties and methods of elimination will be discussed in the article.
Etiology
Often, the violation is congenital, that is, initially the reading skill is distorted. Dyslexia in children in this case is due to biological causes. With intrauterine development of the child, brain damage can occur, leading to depletion of the nervous system. As a result, the brain regions responsible for the psychological functions involved in the formation of reading skills suffer.
The loss or disorder of an initially correctly formed skill arises as a result of the influence of socio-psychological factors, which include pedagogical neglect, lack of verbal contacts, hospitalism syndrome and the like. Dyslexia in schoolchildren can develop if they are exaggerated by the requirements for literacy and teach too fast. In this case, the child develops a state of psychological maladaptation. In combination with adverse social conditions, this leads to the appearance of disorders such as dyslexia and dysgraphia. In children, these disorders in recent years are becoming more common.
Symptomatology
Reading errors are far from all manifestations of the disorder. Specialists who consider the problem more broadly also talk about the clinical signs that often accompany dyslexia. Symptoms, for example, include cerebration, mental infantilism. Immediately a violation of the reading skill is manifested in the slow pace of this speech activity and a large number of various errors. Among them, several groups can be distinguished:
- mixing and replacing letters that indicate phonetically close sounds;
- replacement of graphically similar letters;
- rearrangement, omissions / additions of syllables and letters, i.e. distortion of the sound-syllabic structure;
- problems with understanding the read word, sentence, text in the absence of violations in the reading technique ;
- agrammatisms, mirror reading.
Clinical and psychological approach
To understand what dyslexia is, it is necessary to consider it in various aspects. So, often this disorder occurs in children with systemic disorders of the central nervous system (diffuse, functional, local, organic). Such children suffer from partial insufficiency of higher mental functions, have problems with stability and regulation of the mobility of mental processes. Also, in children, pathological features of the emotional sphere are observed: weak verbal-logical thinking with good figuratively-visual, normal adaptation in everyday conditions along with school maladaptation and so on. Children have an insufficient amount of auditory-speech memory, a lack of graphic and visual abilities.
Many researchers attribute the disorder to the lack of development of spoken language, and among the factors of reading difficulties they call the underdevelopment of sound-letter associations, as well as a violation of phonetic decoding. Children have difficulty establishing code matches (letter-to-sound) and cannot automate this process. As a result, their cognitive activity decreases.
Reading mastery
The reproduction of the sound form of a word, based on its graphic image, is reading. According to the psychological and physiological structure, this process is the opposite of writing. When we write, we express the meaning in alphabetic characters, and when we read, we understand the meaning through the perception of letters.
In the process of reading involved speech-auditory, speech-reading, speech-motor analyzers. To read, you need to move your eyes, run ahead (antipation) and come back (regression). If freedom of movement in the text of the eyes is limited, then the reading process is violated, because the perception of words occurs immediately at the moment of fixation, that is, when the eyes stop on the line. The number of fixations depends on how familiar the words are, their structures, etc. The letters in the word play the role of landmarks. When we read, we perceive not all letters, but only dominant ones.
Classification
Based on the accounting of operations disturbed during the reading, different types of pathology were identified. Let's consider each of them in more detail.
1. Optical dyslexia
Symptoms of this form are that children cannot accurately perceive the graphic image and reproduce the visual series, as a result of which they have difficulty understanding letters. Children confuse letters that have graphic similarities, and cannot distinguish them by optical characteristics. Such children are unable to visual synthesis and analysis.
2. Phonemic dyslexia
The disorder is associated with the underdevelopment of the functions of the phonemic system, which include:
- meaningful - the ability to correlate certain combinations of phonemes with meaning when a change in one phoneme or sequence of units of the sound system entails a change in meaning;
- auditory pronunciation differentiation - the ability to distinguish phonemes articulately and acoustically;
- phonemic analysis - the ability to decompose words into their phonemes.
Children usually have difficulty with hearing-pronouncing differentiation and phonemic analysis. In the first case, this is manifested by the confusion of acoustically-articulatory similar sounds, spelling, omissions of consonants when they are combined, rearrangement of sounds and syllables. In the second case, children have difficulty determining:
- the presence or absence of sound;
- places of sound in a word (at the beginning, middle, end);
- first / last sound;
- sequence of sounds;
- total number of sounds;
- the place of a sound in a word relative to other (neighboring) sounds.
3. Agramatic dyslexia
Often this form is found in children with general speech disorders. It is due to the underdevelopment of syntactic and morphological generalizations, the grammatical speech system. Children with such a disorder in the process of reading change the case endings and numbers of nouns, incorrectly coordinate adjectives and nouns in gender, case, number, change the gender endings of pronouns, forms, types and tenses of verbs.
4. Semantic dyslexia
Correction of such a violation requires slightly different approaches than in other cases, since this type of disorder is characterized by problems with understanding the actual content and meaning of the text, although technically the student reads the text correctly. Violation options:
- reading by syllables, when a child sequentially pronounces syllables, but cannot combine them into a meaningful whole, and therefore cannot perceive information during reading, that is, there are difficulties in sound syllabic synthesis;
- full reading, when the child cannot clearly imagine the syntactic connection within the sentence, that is, he perceives every word not in conjunction with neighboring words, but in isolation;
- combination of the first two options, when reading by syllables with a lack of understanding of the meaning is accompanied by a vague idea of syntactic relationships in sentences.
5. Mnestic dyslexia
This violation is caused by problems with the auditory-speech memory, as a result of which the child experiences difficulties with the formation of a connection between the visual image of the letter and the sound. A schoolboy cannot remember letters, replaces them when reading with others, confuses.
6. Tactile dyslexia
A disorder of this kind is characteristic of the blind. When reading, such people do not use visual perception, but the sensorimotor system (read through tactile sensations). However, studies show that in blind children, dyslexia in its mechanisms does not differ at all from speech disorders that occur in sighted children. With tactile disorder, the main problem is a violation of the recognition of letters of a letter in Braille (this French scientist invented a tactile font for blind people). Blind children with dyslexia lose words when reading, confuse letters, often do not read the word to the end, but try to guess it. Moreover, disturbances in the movement of the fingers in such children correspond to disturbances in the movement of the eyes that occur in sighted children suffering from a similar disorder (they have random rotation of the eyes, frequent regressions).
Dyslexia: treatment
Violation can be a lifelong problem, although some people still manage to develop functional reading skills. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of dyslexics never reach the required level of literacy. To improve the situation, it is necessary to fully correct the entire educational process. Children with such a disorder require the use of direct and indirect teaching methods for word recognition and the formation of skills to highlight components in words. With direct training, special phonetic techniques are used that are not related to reading mastery. Indirect learning involves the use of a special program, which through certain phonetic techniques allows you to learn how to read
The elimination of dyslexia is made in various ways. Each child should be treated individually. So, for some, an approach that involves learning to read immediately with whole words and expressions will be preferable, but for someone, a technique that uses a hierarchical system for acquiring reading skills is better if the child is first taught to perceive sound units, and then words and suggestions. It is also recommended to use treatment options in which the effect is carried out immediately on different types of sensory organs. As for the medical treatment of pathology or the use of such methods of therapy as optometric trainings and the like, their effectiveness has not been proven to date.
Finally
Many parents get scared when their children are diagnosed with dyslexia. For some reason, most people consider this pathology a mental illness. However, this is not at all true. Children with such a disorder often exhibit phenomenal abilities in other areas, for example, physics, mathematics, music, and painting. So what is dyslexia? Problem or ... gift? Think carefully before replying.