COGS101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Asperger Syndrome, Language Delay, Phonics
2 Jun 2018
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Week 2: Dyslexia
What is dyslexia?
• Acquired dyslexia → reading problem in someone who was previously a
normal/confident reader, yet loses of aspect of reading system due to
head/brain injury
o Formal definition = a reading impairment in someone who learned to
read normally but then lost that ability after brain damage
• Developmental dyslexia → someone who had difficulty to read/learn in the
first place
o Formal definition = a reading impairment in someone (often a child)
who never learned to read normally in the first place
o No child will learn to read without instruction/appropriate conditions –
a child needs to be TAUGHT, that is how you learn
o But some children fail despite;
▪ No obvious neurological/sensory impairment
▪ Supportive environment
• Bell curve distribution → how do we detect this?
o The children who are falling at the end of the distribution (at the
bottom of the hill) – these children are suffering
o Instructional casualties = the children who have not had opportunities
to read (children who are ill, teaching standards were not met at certain
schools etc.)
• Response to intervention for diagnosis
o Some of children at the bottom of distribution may be ‘instructional
casualties’
o We identify these through a Response to Intervention model:
▪ Do they respond to intensive intervention? Or are they still
here?
o Child with dyslexia can be identified if the child still has the
opportunity to learn, yet suffers and lays at the bottom of the bell curve
distribution
• Different kinds of dyslexia
o As reading involves many processes, would not expect it always to fail
in the same way
o Different kinds of dyslexia depending on which subskill has not
developed normally
How does reading work?
• What are the cognitive processes that are impaired in dyslexia?
o There needs to be a cognitive model of the reading process
• Reading is not a single skill → it consists of many separate skills, even at the
level of reading single words
o Difficult to separate in fluent reading but apparent when reading fails
• Stages of reading development
o Children go through different broad phases of reading acquisition as
they learn different skills
o Logographic phase (4-5 years)
▪ Small sight vocabulary of known words ‘MacDonalds’
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▪ Often identified by salient graphic features ‘yellow’ has two
tall sticks
▪ Cannot attempt unfamiliar words
▪ As number of words increases, problems occur ‘follow’ and
‘yellow’
o Alphabetic phase (5-7 years)
▪ Acquire ‘phonic’ knowledge – sound out
▪ Children learn relationships between sounds and letters
▪ Attempt to pronounce words not seen before;
• Though not necessarily correctly
• E.g. yachted for yacht
▪ Reading may feed back to spoken vocab e.g. ‘I’m throughly
enjoying myself’
o Orthographic phase (7-8years+)
▪ Read words as whole units without sounding out
▪ Not visual or cue based like logographic phase
▪ Rapid recognition of familiar letter strings
• Two key processes
o 1. Sounding out of ‘non-lexical’ skills
▪ Reads new words and nonsense words e.g. gop
▪ Mistakes with irregular words e.g. yacht
o 2. Whole word or ‘lexical’ skills
▪ Reads all familiar words including irregular
▪ Can’t read new words or nonsense words
o Basis of dual route model of skilled reading
▪ Top of the model → a printed word presented (the letters will
be recognized)
• Then leads to the process of letter-sound rules (non-
lexical route)
• Letter recognition also leads to written word store, word
meaning store, spoken word (pronunciation) store
(lexical route)
▪ Both these lead to speech sounds = speech
Different Kinds of Dyslexia
• Surface Dyslexia
o Nature of problem → poor whole word or lexical reading i.e. small
sight vocabulary
o Key symptoms → inaccurate reading aloud of irregular words e.g.
hose, yacht
▪ Case (Castles and Coltheart, 1996)
• 9 year old boy, parents both highly literate and siblings
were high achievers
• IQ superior → over 30
• Reading and spelling in bottom quartile on standardized
tests
▪ Irregular and non-word reading → the boy had a low score on
irregular words (below the normal range), but higher score
(upper end of the normal range) on non-word reading
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