Reading and Writing Disorder : Dyslexia

Experts encourage pre-school diagnosis of dyslexia

Children with dyslexia can now be diagnosed from as young as four-years-old, experts advise.

Chartered educational psychologist Dr Peter Gardner, said that diagnostic advances in recent years mean that dyslexic children can now receive help and support earlier.

Parents are advised that dyslexia is present from birth and so can be detected before a child reaches school age.

“All the available research points to the fact that if children’s learning difficulties are diagnosed early and appropriate help is offered at an early stage, the child is given the best chance of success,” he maintained.

“So much of the suffering and lack of self-confidence of these children could be avoided by a nationwide screening programme of children entering school.”

Early signs of dyslexia include short-term memory of spoken information, appreciation of rhyme and sound discrimination.

According to the Dyslexia Research Trust, approximately 50 per cent of the learning difficulty is inherited, with more males than females being affected.

http://www.bounty.com/Experts-encourage-pre-school-diagnosis-of-….news/19067870

Unraveling the roots of dyslexia

By peering into the brains of people with dyslexia compared to normal readers, a study published online on March 12th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, has shed new light on the roots of the learning disability, which affects four to ten percent of the population. The findings support the notion that the reading and spelling deficit—characterized by an inability to break words down into the separate sounds that comprise them—stems in part from a failure to properly integrate letters with their speech sounds.

“The adults with dyslexia in the study had enough reading experience to match letters and their speech sounds correctly,” said Vera Blau of the University of Maastricht, The Netherlands “Still, the results show that the way their brain integrates letters and speech sounds is very different from normal readers. It’s quite astonishing.”

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-03/cp-utr030509.php