Dyslexia references

"Poor visual processing play a significant role in a large majority of children who struggle to read: Several perceptual studies have suggested that dyslexic [children] subjects process visual information more slowly than normal children. Such visual abnormalities were reported to be found in more than 75% of the reading-disability children tested."

Margaret Livingstone, et al, from the Department or Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School and the Dyslexia Research Laboratory, Beth Israel Hospital in Boston.

Learning is accompliahed through a complex series of processes, one of which is vision. Vision training does not directly treat learning disabilities or dyslexia. However Vision training improves visual efficiency, thereby allowing the child to learn easier.

There are three main areas where vision is fundamental to learning:

Visual acuity or normal 20/20 vision. This is usually attended to by school eye exams.

Visual efficiency such as eye-coordination and siccadic eye movements. This is not tested in the regular eye exam. However, this area is in many cases the physical root cause that manifest itself as the symptoms associated with dyslexia.

Visual information processing including spatial awareness and visual integration with other senses. This is the mind side of vision.

"In human society, most information is acquired through the visual system. Uncorrected impairment of visual functioning can prevent the normal acquisition of information and lead to difficulties in learning... There may be subtle abnormalities of binocular functioning, accommodation to close visual targets, or higher processing of visual information that interfere with the learning process. Detection of any such abnormalities... at the earliest possible point in a child's development are crucial to the prevention of subsequent learning disabilities that might otherwise ensue."

Learning Disabilities - A Report to the U.S. Congress,

Prepared by the Interagency Committee of Learning DIsabilities, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, 1987, page 32

drawing

At this time no known cause for Dyslexia also there is no single pattern into which these children fit. In some there is also a hearing component involved. Especially if the child had frequent colds or throat infections in the first five years, the ears can be blocked from time to time so that hearing is impaired. The early learning of sounds and words is fundamental to a child developing the ability to comprehend language and text.

With the use of EEG measurments it has been possible to see the increased brain activity on the right side of the brain when children is beginning to learn to read. Increased left brain activity is also noticed in the advanced reader. However, the brain activity of Dyslexic children show variations of left-right side activity.

Colour overlays

Helen Irlen, a California psychologist discovered that some Dyslexic children could read more comfortable and for longer periods of time when they were looking through coloured filters. Acording to Irlen "Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome" is a condition in which reading is hampered by distortion of print. When text is read through specially selected colour, diffrent for each individual, becomes comfortable.

Try for yourself, select a background color for this page

Generally most doctors do not take this seriously. However, Arnold Wilkins, MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge is conducting some interesting research about the application fo colored overlays for Dyslexia. Read more about it here Helping reading with colour.