Does your child have dyslexia? How do you know? Dyslexia is defined as:
a neurologically-based, often inherited, disorder which interferes with the acquisition and processing of language. Varying in degrees of severity, it is manifested by difficulties in receptive and expressive language, including phonological processing, in reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, and sometimes in arithmetic.
Dyslexia is not the result of lack of motivation, sensory impairment, inadequate instructional or environmental opportunities, or other limiting conditions, but may occur together with these conditions.
So what are some warning signs or “red flags” that would lead a parent to suspect dyslexia? If you see any of these signs in a child who is five or older, the child should be tested for dyslexia.
–Mixing up multi-syllabic words. Like “pisgetti” for “spaghetti” or “aminal” for “animal”.
–Confusion over directional words like over vs. under or right vs. left, or behind vs in front.
–Difficulty in recognizing rhyming words.
–Difficulty in using phonetics to sound out words.
–Confusing certain letters (directionally) like b-d, n-u or m-w.
–Difficulty with sequencing tasks.
–Difficulty with learning to tell time.
If your child has three or more of these symptoms, it would be wise to rule out dyslexia. If someone in your family has dyslexia, the risk is even greater.
One of the things we’ve ruled out of LuLu’s constellation of disabilities is dyslexia. How have we ruled it out? Because spelling and decoding words is one of her relative strengths when it comes to reading. Yes, she has reading difficulties, but they seem to be associated with auditory and visual processing deficits and severe ADHD. But our understanding of this has only come through testing her for a variety of things and getting a complete understanding of which parts of reading and writing are difficult for her.
There are some symptoms that auditory or visual processing deficits have in common with dyslexia. These include dropping endings off of words or skipping small words while reading, like “a”, “an”, “of” or “the”. Or ignoring punctuation and substituting the wrong word.
And there are some symptoms found in both ADHD and dyslexia. In fact, there are a significant number of children with dyslexia who also have ADHD (some report up to 40%). These include inability to organize work and messy rooms.
The lynchpin for teaching a child with dyslexia or another learning or processing disability to read appears to be phonemic awareness. Phonemes are the smallest unit of language (the individual spoken sound). Being able to identify the three sounds in a word like “cat” or “mop” is the basic building block for reading. The next step is understanding the written letters of c-a-t represent those three phonemes.