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Google search is what I think is called a Predictive Adaptive Lexicon. When my son was quite young - - 5-6 - - it was soon apparent he was dyslexic but the schools did nothing to help. Computers were becoming quite popular. I thought this was the way to go. Remember the Amiga 500/600 with the text to speech? Teachers in the main thought dyslexia a neat excuse for middle-class parents. There is still a lamentable ignorance amongst the generality of the profession - despite plenty of courses - which amounts to a sort of willful refusal to accept the obvious.

In the 80s and 90s a lot of effort was put into dyslexia software in the UK. I kept abreast of all the developments and kept a folder 6" thick. My son never got to use any of this stuff, but now text-to-speech and speech-to-text is pretty commonplace. Many companies have produced things like colour coded word-processing of text, where, e.g.,consonant groups are in blocks of colour. This is so easy to do in Word if the text is preprepared, so buying such software is hardly worth it.

A lot of diagnostics have been produced, for example, a series of programmes put out under the auspices of a set- up at the University of Hull.

Two things I learnt about dyslexia that changed my way of thinking about it were

• An 70s article about reading by Sevrin Chin-Chance, then a Ph.D. student, and now in the ediucation hierarchy of some U.S. State or other, which I will look up and explain in a bit more detail. C-C did some work on the types of reading strategies in ordinary readers (as opposed to slow readers) and found some very interesting things which no one seemed to take much notice of in the literature I read subsequently and to date.
• The work on saccades. This showed - they still do a lot of this stuff - that a mature reader fixes on the middle of each word as the eye skips along the line of text. The eye is primed, according to what I read the other day, to pre-plan where to hit the page, dead smack in the middle of each word, time after time. It was obvious to me that the type of dyslexic my son was probably couldn't do this saccading properly, but scanned back and forwards over the words.

• It is not quite as simple as that, both because it is a spectrum of difficulty and there is the learning of the words in the first place, both aurally and visually. A normal reader uses a mixture of visual and phonetic means, whereas the severe dyslexic is forced back on phonetics which makes learning the words much harder and longer.
  
• The brain of this type of dyslexic doesn't work in the same way as a normal reader. Much brain research was done implicating the cingulate gyrus, and much earlier work suggested the corpus callosum joining the two sides of the brain, which they said had not lost enough of the neurons it should during the later stages of development, hence too much traffic between left and right side of brain. The original term for this type of dyslxia was "developmental dyslexia" a term used by British experts 40-50 years ago.
• Work by Galaburda et al showed that "Fast words speed past dyslexics" New Sci 27 August 1994. It would be quite east to test this using a tape recorder if your kid is dyslexic: read out the same piece of text [or three pieces of text of equivalent difficulty] at different speeds and see how much they comprehend in each.
  
• simply spacing words out on the page probably helps too
  

1. Do an experiment on the screen with different spacing to get the optimum spacing for your sprog. Make the words different colour too [ one version coloured/one, monochrome].
   

posted by Adfero Affero @ 1:49 AM