Dyslexia: Symptoms, Causes and Types of Dyslexia

What is Dyslexia and who is a Dyslexic/Dyslectic?
Dyslexia is a condition of learning disability, causes difficulty with reading and writing. This can happen not due to intelligence of a person, but it is characterized by difficulty or inability to learn adequate reading or writing skills although conventional teaching and social-cultural activities are available. It primarily impacts on the reading and writing abilities. It is a neurological or brain-based condition. People affected by Dyslexia are called Dyslexic or Dyslectic.

Characteristics
Individuals with Dyslexia:
1. May seem to be bright, intelligent and articulate, but their reading, writing and speaking is under par based on their age group.
2. Have average or above average intelligence, but may fail terribly in academics.
3. May have good speaking abilities, but his performance in the written language exams will be very poor.
4. Is labeled lazy, dumb, careless and immature. Always given a remark of "not trying hard enough" or said to have an attitude or behavior problem.
5. Are always termed as worst or back of the lot at school. This is because Dyslexia affects the reading, sparing other intellectual abilities.
6. Feel dumb and have poor self-esteem.
7. Get easily emotional and frustrated about school reading and testing.
8. Will try to hide the reading weakness with ingenious compensatory strategies.
9. Always learn best through hands-on experience, demonstrations, experiments, observations and Audio-visual aids.
10. Talented in other areas like art, drama, music, sports, mechanics, story-telling, sales, business, designing, building and engineering.
11. Have problems related to concentration. They may daydream, get lost easily or lose track of time.

Types of Dyslexia

Speech and Language disorders
a. Difficulty producing speech sounds (developmental articulation disorder). The person might mispronounce certain letters or letter combinations
b. Difficulty understanding what other people say (developmental receptive language disorder).
c. Difficulty using spoken language to communicate (developmental expressive language disorder).

Academic Learning Disorders
a. Reading problems (developmental reading disorder, or dyslexia). The person cannot identify different word sounds.
b. Writing problems (developmental writing disorder, or dysgraphia). The person has problems with handwriting or with creating sentences that make sense to others.
c. Arithmetic skills problems (developmental arithmetic disorder, or dyscalculia). The person has problems with calculations or with abstract mathematical concepts.

Other Learning Disorders
a. Fine motor skills problems (dyspraxia).
b. Nonverbal Learning Disorder.

Symptoms related to speech/hearing
1. poor oral language
2. takes a while to learn how to talk
3. pronunciation is haywire
4. Poor vocabulary in comparison with the age group.
5. never follow directions
6. Confusion with certain words like left/right, before/after, etc.
7. difficulty in learning alphabets, rhymes or songs
8. can’t understand concepts and relationships
9. words and names are very hard to recollect
10. Can’t identify rhyming words.
11. Difficulty in hearing and manipulating sounds in words
12. difficulty in distinguishing different sounds in words
13. Difficulty in learning the sounds of letters.

Early Symptoms
1. Symptoms at Pre-school and Kindergarten levels
a. Delayed speech
b. Mixing sounds in multi-syllabic word (e.g. Aminal for Animal).
c. Early cluttering or stuttering
d. Too many ear infections
e. Mastering the art of tying shoes is never easy
f. Late to establish a dominant hand
g. Poor Phonemic awareness
h. Difficulty in producing rhyming words
i. Difficulty in learning letters and writing them in order.

2. Symptoms Related To Reading and Spelling Abilities
a. Can read a word in one page correctly, but in the very next page, he may fail to recognize it.
b. Knows phonics, but can’t sound out an unknown word.
c. Slow, inaccurate and labored reading of single words in isolation.
d. Misreading happens most often when the first and last letters are same, for e.g. form-from, trail-trial, etc.
e. They may add or leave out letters, for e.g. cold-could, star-stair, etc.
f. They may also say a word that has same letters, but in a different sequence. For e.g. who-how, saw-was, etc.
g. Substitutes similar looking words, for e.g. house for horse, sunrise for surprise, etc.
h. When reading aloud, ignores punctuation, reading is very slow and out of order.
i. Seems to be tired after reading a short paragraph.
j. Listening comprehension is better than reading comprehension.
k. Misreads, omits or adds small functional words like a, an, from, to etc.
l. Omits or changes suffixes, saying need for needed, talks for talking or late for lately.
m. They have extreme difficulty with vowels and often flunk in spellings.
n. They tend to memorize the spellings, but can’t write them after a short while.
o. Misspells even while copying something from the board or from a book.
p. Written work is a good enough proof for weakness in spellings, with lots of cuts, erasures.

3. Problems Related to Handwriting
a. Unusual pencil grip.
b. They put down their heads on the desk to watch the tip of the pencil as they write.
c. They often get hand cramps. This is due to very tight gripping of the pencil.
d. Writing is slow and labored.
e. Unusual starting and ending points of the letters.
f. Letters normally do not sit on the horizontal lines.
g. Words may be tightly spaced or widely pushed apart.
h. Ignorance with the margin.
i. Copying is tedious and takes time to develop cursive writing.
j. The child avoids writing whenever possible.
k. Writes everything as one long sentence
l. Can’t understand punctuation
m. Confusion over a complete sentence and fragments.
n. Illegible handwriting, and takes a long time to write.
o. Does not notice errors during proof reading.

4. Directionality
a. Confusions over left-right, before-after, etc
b. Confusions over b-d, m-n, etc.
c. Confusion on b-p, d-q, n-u, m-w.

5. Difficulties in Math
a. Memorizing facts of addition, and subtraction is a pain
b. Memorizing multiplication tables is a Herculean task
c. Remembering the sequence of steps in division is very difficult.
d. They do not show their mathematical work, they have it in their mind.