Stop saying dyslexics can’t read!

About 13 years ago, as a keen PhD student, I took myself off to the British Dyslexia Conference in Harrogate. I was very keen to hear about the latest research and of course to sample the delights of Betty’s Tearoom. I sat expectantly in a seminar room, and watched as a cognitive psychologist took to the lectern with the following introduction:

“Dyslexia is a debilitating reading disorder”

Wow.

Really?

I felt a visceral punch to my stomach, even though no one had physically touched me. I was back in year 7, in the bottom set with all the other ‘disordered’ children, and the message was clear – I was broken, deficient, defunct.  

And then I felt cross that this message was and is still being played out across the country to countless children and adults, by medical professionals or psychologists, and reducing the rich and valid experience of dyslexia to a ‘reading disorder’.  

A common misconception is that dyslexia is a problem with reading. Countless definitions define dyslexia as ‘a problem with reading and spelling’. It is understandable, given that the phenomenon of ‘dyslexia’ has been conceptualized and stigmatized largely by a print-literate society, and an education system that prioritises reading and literacy over most other skills (apart from maths). The UK curriculum, fixated on developing children’s literacy skills from the age of four, does so at the expense of developing skills such as drawing and visual-spatial processing. 

But it’s not true that dyslexic people can’t read or can’t read well, merely that we read differently from what is considered to be the ‘typical’. Difficulties with decoding and fluency do not necessarily prohibit dyslexic learners from reading or from constructing positive dyslexic identities. The educational psychologist, David Grant reports that most dyslexic adults can read: 

‘It is not true that dyslexics cannot read’… ‘Probably [only] 10 per cent choose to read for pleasure [and]… their reading ability is well below expectation’.[i]

Empowering reading experiences may play a crucial part in the construction of positive dyslexic identities.[ii]

 A study of dyslexic learners who had an avid interest in reading revealed a number of highly literate dyslexic adults and one Nobel Prize winner.[iii]

In this article I explore the cognitive processes involved in dyslexic reading and the surprising benefits.

The research

Several control studies by psychologists aim to determine what cognitive processes literate dyslexic readers are using when they read, and if these are any different to those used by the non-dyslexic control groups. According to empirical research, dyslexic learners have difficulty in decoding many ‘bottom-up’ language processes such as phonology (the sound structure of spoken words), orthography (the written rules of language such as punctuation and spelling), graphology (the written symbols) and semantics (the meaning of words).

Early studies proposed that lower-level processing difficulties (such as phonological processing) are compensated by high-level processes such as contextual facilitation[iv]

The theory is based on the interactive-compensatory model of reading, which argues that reading is an interactive process of both top-down and bottom-up processes operating simultaneously during reading [v]

At different stages, readers may rely more heavily on some levels of processing than others, and a reader’s weakness in one area may be compensated for by his or her use of other processes.

Fluent readers use primarily bottom-up, data-driven processing skills; they are able rapidly to decode written words, meaning there is little time or need for contextual facilitation.[vi]

However, dyslexic learners use greater contextual facilitation than non-dyslexic fluent readers using context to compensate for partial decoding[vii]

These readers are more likely to be anticipating the meaning of the text before checking the syntax and graphical clues. The meaning of text is absorbed from the descriptive clues available in the context of the passage such as the syntactic context (the structure of the sentence), the semantic context (the anticipated meaning of the passage) and graphical information such as the look of the word) [viii]

It’s been suggested that dyslexic learners are particularly skilled at ‘gist detection’ or finding core meaning in passages of text as they are skilled at detecting the broader context from a concept or message.  This skill is not confined to reading but is something that is utilized in everyday life. The use of context is one cognitive strategy used by dyslexic learners to make meaning out of language.

The problem with guesswork

The use of descriptive clues and guesswork in reading can often result in mispronouncing and misunderstanding familiar-looking words. [x] Some psychologists have suggested that misreading is due to problems with visual and phonological awareness. [xi] However, misreading is symptomatic of a dyslexic processing strength in perceiving relationships between words, ideas and concepts, which are connected either through similarity, association or cause and effect. [xii] Eide and Eide suggests that words or concepts are surrounded by ‘a rich network of association and that these associations can become overwhelming and give rise to unintended substitutions’. [xii]

Examples of substitutions that are structurally similar, involving similar-sounding or looking words, called malapropisms, including the spelling of ‘whole’ with ‘hole’ and in the similar-sounding and looking substitution of ‘blossom’ with ‘bosom’.

The other type of substitution is called conceptual substitution, which is a strength in perceiving distant, or seemingly unrelated relationships between things.

Examples include substituting the word ‘menu’ for ‘itinerary’ in ‘so where are you going next on your menu’?

These conceptual substitutions are called paralexic or paraphasic errors or deep substitutions in reading.[xiv] A series of control studies found that dyslexic groups had a greater ability to find similarities and likenesses amongst visual patterns or verbal concepts than the non-dyslexic control group. [xv]

So, the idea that dyslexics can’t read or that their reading experiences are somehow less rich because we read differently, is plain wrong.

As a dyslexic learner, I’m tired of reading –

‘Dyslexia is a Reading Disorder’

Even the concept that dyslexia is a ‘condition’ implies that there is something wrong that needs fixing.

I for one, wouldn’t trade my gist detection or malapropisms for fluency and accurate word decoding!

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References:

[i]  Grant, 2010: 33

[ii] Anderson 2007

[iii] Fink 1995

[iv]  Stanovich and West 1981, 1983

[v] Stanovich 1980b; Perfetti and Roth 1981

[vi] Stanovich (1980a,b) and Perfetti and Roth (1981)

[vii] (Nation and Snowling 1998; Corkett and Parrila 2008)

[viii] (Reid 2009a: 107)

[x] Galaburda 2000

[xi] Galaburda (in Whitfield 1999) and Snowling (2000)

[xii] Eide and Eide 2011: 83

[xiii] Eide and Eide 2011: 95

[xiv] Eide and Eide 2011: 95-97.

[xv] (Everatt, Steffert and Smythe 1999; Everatt, Weeks and Brooks 2007).