What is dyslexia? Dyslexia in children: symptoms and treatment

Many people have no idea what dyslexia is. But there are also those who are familiar with this specific violation, which is expressed in the inability to learn the skill of reading. Dyslexia in children manifests itself in persistent mistakes caused by the disorder or lack of consistency of the psychological functions that are responsible for the reading process. Violation can be acquired or congenital, observed in children with intellectual insufficiency and in children with completely normal intelligence. About what is dyslexia, its causes, symptoms, varieties and methods of elimination, we will tell in the article.

Etiology

Often the violation is innate, 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, resulting in a depletion of the nervous system. As a consequence, the brain departments responsible for the psychological functions involved in the formation of the reading skill suffer.

The loss or breakdown of an initially correctly formed skill arises from the impact of socio-psychological factors, which include pedagogical neglect, insufficiency of speech contacts, a syndrome of hospitalism, and the like. Dyslexia in schoolchildren can develop if they are subjected to excessive requirements for literacy, conduct training too quickly. In this case, the child has a state of psychological disadaptation. In combination with adverse social conditions, this entails the emergence of such violations as dyslexia and dysgraphia. In children, these disorders in recent years are becoming more common.

Symptomatics

Errors in reading are not all manifestations of the disorder. Experts who consider the problem more widely, also talk about the clinical signs, which are often accompanied by dyslexia. Symptoms, for example, include cerebration, mental infantilism. Direct violation of the reading skill is manifested in the slow pace of this speech activity and a large number of various errors. There are several groups among them:

• Blending and replacing letters that indicate phonetically close sounds;
• Replacement of graphically similar letters;
• Permutation, omissions / additions of syllables and letters, that is, distortion of the sonic-syllabic structure;
• Problems with understanding the read word, sentence, text in the absence of violations in the technology of reading ;
• Agrammatism, mirror reading.

Clinical-psychological approach

To understand what dyslexia is, you need to consider it in different 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 the stability and regulation of the mobility of mental processes. Also in children, pathological features of the emotional sphere are observed: the weakness of verbal-logical thinking in good figurative-visual, normal adaptation in everyday conditions, along with school disadaptation and so on. Children have insufficient volume of auditory memory, lack of graphic and visual abilities.

Many researchers associate the disorder with the lack of development of oral speech and among the factors of difficulty in reading are the underdevelopment of sound-letter associations, as well as the violation of phonetic decoding. Children experience difficulties in establishing code correspondences (letter-sound) and can not automate this process. As a result, they have reduced cognitive activity.

Mastering reading

Playing the sound form of a word, based on its graphic representation, is reading. This process is the opposite of writing by the psychological-physiological structure. When we write, we express sense in alphabetic characters, and when we read, we understand the meaning through the perception of letters.

In the process of reading, a recursive, discreet, speech-analyzing analyzer is involved. To read, you need to move your eyes, run ahead (antipatsiya) and go back (regression). If freedom of movement according to 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, their structures, etc. Letters in the word play the role of landmarks. When we read, we do not perceive all the letters, but only the dominant ones.

Classification

Based on the account of operations that were disrupted 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 consist in the fact that children can not accurately perceive the graphic image and reproduce the visual series, as a result of which they have difficulties with the assimilation of letters. Children confuse letters that have a graphic similarity, and can not distinguish them according to optical characteristics. Such children are incapable of visual synthesis and analysis.

2. Phonemic dyslexia

The disorder is associated with the underdevelopment of the functions of the phonemic system, including:

• Meaning-the ability to correlate certain combinations of phonemes with meaning, when a change in one phoneme or a sequence of units of the sound system entails a change in meaning;
• Hearing-related differentiation - the ability to distinguish between phonemes articulatory and acoustically;
• Phonemic analysis - the ability to spread out words into their phonemes.

Children usually experience difficulties with hearing-bearing differentiation and phonemic analysis. In the first case, this is manifested by confusing acoustic-articulatory similar sounds, reading by letters, skipping consonants at their confluence, rearranging sounds and syllables. In the second case, children experience difficulties in determining:

• Presence or absence of sound;
• Place of sound in the word (at the beginning, middle, end);
• First / last sound;
• A sequence of sounds;
• The total number of sounds;
• The place of a sound in a word relative to other (neighboring) sounds.

3. Agrammatical dyslexia

Often this form is found in children with general speech disorders. It is due to underdevelopment of syntactic and morphological generalizations, grammatical speech system. Children with such frustration change the endings and numbers of nouns in the process of reading, incorrectly agree adjectives and nouns in gender, case, number, change the ancestral endings of pronouns, forms, types and times of verbs.

4. Semantic dyslexia

Correction of such a violation requires several 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 the schoolboy textually teaches the text correctly. Violation options:

• Reading by syllables, when the child successively pronounces syllables, but can not combine them into a meaningful whole, and therefore can not perceive the information during reading, that is, the complexity of the sound synthesis;
• Reading full words, when the child can not clearly present a syntactic link within the sentence, that is, each word he perceives not in conjunction with neighboring words, but in isolation;
• The combination of the first two options, when reading syllables with a misunderstanding of meaning is accompanied by vague ideas about syntactic links in sentences.

5. Mystical dyslexia

This disorder is caused by problems with the auditory memory, as a result of which the child experiences difficulties in forming a connection between the visual image of the letter and the sound. A schoolboy can not memorize letters, replaces them when reading to others, confuses.

6. Tactile dyslexia

Disorder of this species is characteristic of the blind. When reading these people do not use visual perception, but the sensorimotor system (read due to tactile sensations). However, studies show that in blind children, dyslexia does not differ in its mechanisms from speech disorders that occur in sighted children. With tactile disorder, the main problem is the violation of recognizing the letters of the Braille letter (this French scientist came up with a tactile font for blind people). Blind children in the presence of dyslexia during reading lose words, confuse letters, often do not read the word to the end, but try to guess it. At the same time, irregularities in the movement of the fingers of such children correspond to disturbances in eye movement that occur in sighted children suffering from a similar disorder (they have chaotic eye movements, frequent regressions).

Dyslexia: treatment

Violation can become a lifelong problem, although some people still manage to develop functional reading skills. And yet the overwhelming majority of the dyslexics never reach the required level of literacy. To improve the situation, it is necessary to correct completely the whole educational process. Children with such a disorder need the use of direct and indirect methods of learning to recognize words and form skills that allow to distinguish components in words. With direct training, special phonetic techniques are used that are not related to reading mastery. Indirect training involves the use of a special program, which, through certain phonetic techniques, allows you to learn how to read

Elimination of dyslexia is done in different ways. Each child should be treated individually. So, for someone preferable is the approach that implies learning to read immediately with whole words and expressions, and for someone better suited method using a hierarchical system for acquiring reading skills, when the child is first taught the perception of sound units, and then words and Proposals. It is also recommended to apply therapy 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 therapies, as optometric trainings and the like, their effectiveness has not been proven to date.

Finally

Many parents are frightened when their children are diagnosed with dyslexia. For some reason, most people consider this pathology a mental illness. However, this is not at all the case. Children who have such a disorder often display phenomenal abilities in other areas, for example, physics, mathematics, music, painting. So what is dyslexia? Is there a problem or ... a gift? Think carefully before answering.