thesis title about dyslexia

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

The 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia research: a bibliometric analysis.

• 1 Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, West China Hospital/West China School of Medicine, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
• 2 Department of Periodical Press and National Clinical Research Center for Geriatrics, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
• 3 Chinese Evidence-Based Medicine Center, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

Background: Citation analysis is a type of quantitative and bibliometric analytic method designed to rank papers based on their citation counts. Over the last few decades, the research on dyslexia has made some progress which helps us to assess this disease, but a citation analysis on dyslexia that reflects these advances is lacking.

Methods: A retrospective bibliometric analysis was performed using the Web of Science Core Collection database. The 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia were retrieved after reviewing abstracts or full-texts to May 20th, 2021. Data from the 100 top-cited studies were subsequently extracted and analyzed.

Results: The 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia were cited between 245 to 1,456 times, with a median citation count of 345. These studies were published in 50 different journals, with the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America” having published the most ( n = 10). The studies were published between 1973 and 2012 and the most prolific year in terms of number of publications was 2000. Eleven countries contributed to the 100 top-cited studies, and nearly 75% articles were either from the USA ( n = 53) or United Kingdom ( n = 21). Eighteen researchers published at least two different studies of the 100 top-cited list as the first author. Furthermore, 71 studies were published as an original research article, 28 studies were review articles, and one study was published as an editorial material. Finally, “Psychology” was the most frequent study category.

Conclusions: This analysis provides a better understanding on dyslexia and may help doctors, researchers, and stakeholders to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of classic studies, new discoveries, and trends regarding this research field, thus promoting ideas for future investigation.

Introduction

Dyslexia is a common learning disorder that affects between 4 and 8% of children ( 1 – 3 ), and often persists into adulthood ( 4 , 5 ). This neurodevelopmental disorder is characterized by reading and spelling impairments that develop in a context of normal intelligence, educational opportunities, and perceptual abilities ( 4 , 6 ). Reading and spelling abilities can be affected together or separately. The learning abilities of children with dyslexia are significantly lower than those of their unaffected pairs of the same age. Generally, difficulties begin to show during the early school years. Dyslexia is a complex multifactorial disorder whose etiology has not been fully elucidated, and it has caused great social and economic burdens. Over the last few decades, the research on dyslexia has made some progress. For example, some studies have shown that dyslexia has a strong genetic background that can affect brain anatomy ( 7 , 8 ) and function ( 9 , 10 ). But a citation analysis on dyslexia that reflects these advances is lacking.

The publication of study results in scientific journals is the most effective strategy to disseminate new research findings. A high number of citations can indicate the potential of a paper to influence the research community and to generate meaningful changes in clinical practice ( 11 ). Citation analysis is a type of quantitative and bibliometric analytic method designed to rank papers based on their citation counts. The latest and up-to-date research findings on dyslexia are well-reflected in recent scientific papers ( 12 ), particularly in the most cited ones ( 13 , 14 ). By analyzing the most cited studies, especially the 100 top-cited studies, we can gain better insight into the most significant advances made in the field of dyslexia research over the course of the past several decades ( 15 ). This retrospective bibliometric approach has been used for many other diseases, such as diabetes ( 16 ), endodontics ( 17 ), cancer ( 18 ). However, to date, no bibliometric analyses have been conducted in the field of dyslexia. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to analyze the 100 top-cited studies in the field of dyslexia.

Materials and Methods

Search method and inclusion criteria.

This retrospective bibliometric analysis was conducted using the Web of Science Core Collection database. The Web of Science Core Collection is a multidisciplinary database with searchable authors and abstracts covering a vast science journal literature ( 19 ). It indexes the major journals of more than 170 subject categories, providing access to retrospective data between 1945 and the present ( 20 ). On May 20th, 2021, we conducted an exhaustive literature retrieval, regardless of the country of origin, publication year, and language. The only search term used was “dyslexia” and the search results were sorted by the number of citations.

Article Selection

Two authors independently screened the abstracts or full-texts to identify the 100 top-cited articles about dyslexia. Disagreements were resolved through discussion. Only studies that focused on dyslexia were included in subsequent analyses. Studies that only mentioned dyslexia in passing were excluded.

Data Extraction

The final list of the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia was determined by total article citation counts. We extracted the following data for each article: title, authors, journal, language, total citation count, publication year, country, journal impact factor, type of article, and Web of Science subject category. If the reprint author had two or more affiliations from different countries, we used the first affiliation as the country of origin. If one article was listed in more than one subject category, the first category was selected. If one article had more than one author, we selected the first-ranked author as the first author and the last-ranked author as the last-author.

Data Analysis

SPSS 11.0 (Chicago, IL, USA) was used to count the frequency. We analyzed the following data: citation count, year of publication, country, the first author, journal, language, type of study, and Web of Science subject category.

Citation Analysis

The 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia based on total citations are listed in Table 1 . The total citation count for these 100 articles combined was 42,222. The total citation count of per study ranged from 245 to 1,456 times, with a median citation count of 345. Only 3 studies were cited more than 1,000 times, and the rest of the studies were cited between 100 and 1,000 times. The title of the top-cited study, which also had the largest mean citation per year count ( n = 91), was “Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: a psycholinguistic grain size theory,” which was published by Ziegler et al. in Psychological Bulletin in 2005 ( 21 ). The second top-cited study, which also had the second-highest mean citation per year count ( n = 80), was published by Vellutino et al. ( 22 ). In addition, we also identified the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia based on mean citation per year, whose results were shown in Supplementary Table 1 .

Table 1 . The 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia based on total citations.

The different journals of the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia and their associated impact factors are listed in Table 2 . The 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia were published in 50 different journals, with the top three in frequency being “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America” ( n = 10), “Brain” ( n = 6), and “Journal of Educational Psychology” ( n = 6).

Table 2 . Journals of the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia.

The journal with the highest total citation count was “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.” However, the highest average citation count per study belonged to the journal “Psychological Bulletin.” The journal impact factors of the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia ranged from 1.315 to 74.699. Of the 100 top-cited studies, 29 were published in a journal with an impact factor greater than 10. The standard “CNS” journals, with the exception of “Cell,” “Nature,” and “Science” published 2 and 3 studies, respectively. Regarding the top four medical journals, while the “New England Journal of Medicine” and “Lancet” published 2 studies each, no top-cited study was published by the “Journal of the American Medical Association” or the “British Medical Journal.”

Language and Year of Publication

The 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia were all published in English and were published between 1973 [by Boder et al. ( 23 )] and 2012 [by Norton et al. ( 24 ) and Peterson et al. ( 25 )] ( Table 3 ). The most productive years were 2000, 2001 and 2003, with 9, 8 and 8 published articles, respectively. The year of 2003 had the most total citations with a total count of 3,788 and an average citation count per study of 474.

Table 3 . Publication year of the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia.

Countries and Authors

Eleven countries contributed articles to the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia ( Table 4 ). Most of the articles were from the USA ( n = 53), United Kingdom ( n = 21), Canada ( n = 7), and France ( n = 6). In addition, the USA had the highest total citation count (23,129), and Italy had the highest average citation count per study (665).

Table 4 . Countries of the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia.

As shown in Table 5 , there were 18 first-authors and 13 last-authors who published more than one of the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia. Among them, Shaywitz SE published the most top 100 articles ( n = 7) on dyslexia as the first author, followed by Galaburda AM ( n = 3) and Pugh KR ( n = 3). And for the last author, 8 studies of the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia research were published by Shaywitz BA who was the most productive.

Table 5 . Authors with at least two first-author or last-author publications in the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia.

Publication Type and Web of Science Subject Categories

As shown in Table 6 , there were 71 studies in the form of an original research article, 28 studies in the form of a review article, and one study in the form of an editorial material publication. The total citation counts for each publication type were 27,812, 13,899, and 511, respectively. Although the type of original research article had the highest total citation count, it had the lowest average citation count per study. In addition, a total of 12 Web of Science subject categories were extracted. Among them, “Psychology” was the most frequent category associated with studies [35], followed by “Clinical Neurology” [15], and “Multidisciplinary Sciences” [15], “Neurosciences” [12], and “Education” [6]. Consistent with the number of studies, the subject categories of “Psychology” and “Clinical Neurology” also had the highest total citation counts (15,683 and 6,427, respectively). The “Behavioral Sciences” subject category had the highest average citation count.

Table 6 . Type of study and subject categories for the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia.

Although retrospective bibliometric approach has been conducted in many other diseases, to our knowledge, no citation analyses have examined publications on dyslexia. Therefore, this study is the first comprehensive analysis summarizing several features of the most influential studies on dyslexia. It has been suggested that a highly cited study can be considered as a milestone study in a related field and has the potential to generate meaningful changes in clinical practice ( 26 ). We believe that the present analysis of the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia may be beneficial to the research community for the following reasons. First, the present study not only provides a historical projection of the scientific progress with regards to dyslexia research, but it also shows associated research trends and gaps in the field ( 27 ). Second, our findings provide critical quantitative information about how both the classic studies and recent advancements in the field have improved our understanding of dyslexia ( 28 ). Third, the present analysis may help journal editors, funding agencies, and reviewers critically evaluate studies and funding applications ( 28 ).

Our analysis discovered that the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia were published in 50 different journals. This may reflect the fact that the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia were very multidisciplinary in nature, unlike the top studies of other fields (e.g., psoriatic arthritis) where there is a more inherent researcher bias for journal selection ( 29 ). Of the 100 top-cited studies, 29 were published in a journal with an impact factor >10, and 62 studies were published in journal with an impact factor >5. However, there were only five studies published in the standard “CNS” journals and only four published in the top four medical journals, which suggests that most dyslexia researchers are more inclined to choose the most influential journals in their respective professional fields when submitting articles ( 30 ). This is in marked contrast with some other fields (e.g. vaccines), where the majority of top-cited articles are published in either the standard “CNS” journals or in the top four medical journals ( 15 ). Several other factors, such as the review turnaround time, likelihood of manuscript acceptance, publication costs, journal publication frequency, will all invariably also affect a researcher's journal selection ( 13 , 20 ).

According to the results of our analysis, nearly 80% of the 100 top-cited studies on dyslexia were published between 1990 and 2005, and the years of 2000 was found to have the most publications. The increase of landmark publications between 1990 and 2005 might reflect an increase in the interest in dyslexia research or that researchers had made some important scientific breakthroughs during this time period. All the top-cited studies on dyslexia were published in English, likely because English is the most commonly used language for knowledge dissemination in the world.

The top countries with regards to total citation count and number of papers in the top 100 list were the USA ( n = 53) and United Kingdom ( n = 21), which accounted for ~75% of the 100 top-cited studies. The USA published the most studies from the list, and this is probably because some of the world's top research centers are located in the USA and likely also the USA receives more research funding ( 31 ). Furthermore, the most prolific first-author (Shaywitz SE) and last-author (Shaywitz BA) were also from the USA. It is also worth mentioning that China had two studies on the top 100 list, which attests to the improvement of our national scientific research community with regards to knowledge dissemination.

In the present study, there were more original research articles ( n = 71) than review articles ( n = 28), but the latter had higher average citation counts per study. These results indicate that even though researchers pay significant attention to new findings on dyslexia, they regularly use information from review articles to convey relevant points in their own papers. We found that “Psychology” was the most frequent subject category associated with the top 100 articles, which indicates that researchers have been working to find effective treatments for people with dyslexia and that research in this field will continue to progress.

Like with other bibliometric analyses, there are some study limitations that should be highlighted. First, the 100 top-cited studies were extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection, which might have excluded some top-cited studies from other databases, such as Scopus and Google Scholar. Second, there was no citation data for recently published studies. Third, self-citations might have substantially influenced the results of the citation analysis. Moreover, this was a cross-sectional study, which implies that the identified 100 top-cited studies could change in the future. Despite these limitations, this descriptive bibliometric study could contribute new information about the scientific interest in dyslexia.

In conclusion, the present analysis is the first analysis to recognize the 100 top-cited studies in the field of dyslexia. This analysis provides a better understanding on dyslexia and may help doctors, researchers, and stakeholders to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of classic studies, new discoveries, and trends regarding this research field. As new data continue to emerge, this bibliometric analysis will become an important quantitative instrument to ascertain the overall direction of a given field, thus promoting ideas for future investigation.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/ Supplementary Material , further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author/s.

Author Contributions

YZ and HF designed the study. SZ and YZ acquired the data and performed statistical analyses. SZ, YZ, and HF drafted the manuscript. All authors critically revised the article and approved the final version of the manuscript.

This study was partly supported by National Clinical Research Center for Geriatrics, West China Hospital, Sichuan University (Z2018B016).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.714627/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords: dyslexia, bibliometric analysis, top-cited, citation analysis, citation

Citation: Zhang S, Fan H and Zhang Y (2021) The 100 Top-Cited Studies on Dyslexia Research: A Bibliometric Analysis. Front. Psychiatry 12:714627. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.714627

Received: 25 May 2021; Accepted: 28 June 2021; Published: 22 July 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Zhang, Fan and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Hong Fan, fanhongfan@qq.com ; Yonggang Zhang, jebm_zhang@yahoo.com

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

INVESTIGATING THE STRENGTHS OF DYSLEXIA IN SUCCESSFUL ADULTS AND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

--> Agahi, Andisheh Sara (2015) INVESTIGATING THE STRENGTHS OF DYSLEXIA IN SUCCESSFUL ADULTS AND UNIVERSITY STUDENTS. PhD thesis, University of Sheffield.

The aim of the research in this thesis is to contribute to the body of knowledge relating to the strengths of dyslexia, with the longer term aim of helping dyslexic individuals to craft their lives and their jobs according to their strengths. This research has its foundation in three ‘communities of practice’: Work Psychology, Positive Psychology and dyslexia. The combination of the three areas of focus has led to the development of ‘Positive Dyslexia’ (Nicolson 2012), with a view to identifying -or crafting- a career that suits one’s strengths. The approach provides a counter-weight to the necessary but limited focus on weaknesses and their remediation. Current knowledge about career strengths in dyslexia is piecemeal and anecdotal. The overall design of the thesis was therefore to explore the territory of dyslexic career strengths by carrying out systematic qualitative interviews with successful dyslexic adults with the aim of identifying sources of commonality and heterogeneity. A questionnaire was then developed designed to incorporate the themes identified in this qualitative research and was administered to dyslexic and non-dyslexic University students thereby providing quantitative data on their incidence in a younger population. The overall design of the study followed an exploratory research design and is outlined below. Study one was a qualitative study with twelve dyslexic high achievers using a semi-structured interview designed to identify what they considered to be their strengths and their difficulties in the workplace. Participants were selected to represent a range of careers. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, 2009) was used to identify sub-ordinate themes. These were then classified into a three-domain taxonomy: Work Strengths, Cognitive Strengths and Inter-personal Strengths, with a 'triad' of strengths in each domain: for the Work Domain, Determination / Resilience, Proactivity and Flexible Coping; for the Cognitive Domain, Innovation, Big Picture approach, and Visuo-spatial skill; for the Interpersonal Domain, Teamwork, Empathy and Communication. Differences between domains arose both from job requirements and from experience. Study 2 was designed to assess the generality of these findings, using interviews with eight dyslexia experts with extensive experience of working with dyslexic adults. The interview schedule used for this study included additional sections relating to support for dyslexics and the need for strengths based research. From the themes in study 1, all six of the Cognitive Strengths Triad, Inter-personal Strengths Triad (the 'Big 6') and the Work Experience Strengths were supported, whereas from the Work Strengths Triad skills, only Determination/Resilience were highlighted. Additional themes emerging were need for ongoing support, areas of difficulty and consequences of not finding strengths. Study 3 was designed to address three issues emerging from the first two studies; first development of quantitative measures of the strengths identified in Studies 1 and 2; second, testing of younger adults (students rather than work professionals) to assess which skills might be self-selecting for success and which might develop through experience; and third to assess the specificity of the Strengths triad to dyslexia by including non-dyslexic student groups that were expected to show strengths in each area. Three student groups were used for this comparison; Management students to compare entrepreneurial traits and behaviours, Psychology students to compare levels of empathy and Architecture students to compare degrees of visuo-spatial ability. A comprehensive test battery was developed based on the themes generated from the first two studies by combining where available, existing tools with direct assessment of interpersonal and cognitive strengths. Student groups were also assessed on Holland’s Occupational Types (1973) in order to investigate job preferences. Overall, it comprised 110 items and was returned by 76 respondents. As expected, the groups showed great heterogeneity in performance, and this reduced the power of the statistical analyses. Between-group differences for Big Picture, Visuo-Spatial, Empathy, and Teamwork were as predicted, with significant differences found for the Big-picture and Visuo-spatial ability. By contrast, the dyslexic group did not show the predicted strengths in Creativity or in Entrepreneurial tendency. Holland job preference analysis revealed a range of differences, with the most striking being a highly significant (compared with the other groups) non-preference for Conventional careers. In conclusion, the studies in this thesis have identified for the first time a set of ten skills, characteristic of successful dyslexia adults, and developed prototype tools that allow these strengths to be assessed. The thesis also provides suggestive evidence that these skills may develop further through work experience and highlights the heterogeneity of individual strengths, both in dyslexic and non-dyslexic students. The findings provide strong support for the longer-term aim of developing dyslexia-friendly career advice and talent development systems based on a person's unique strengths. The findings have strong implications for parents, schools and employers.

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Theories about Developmental Dyslexia

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Despite proving its usefulness for over a century, the concept of developmental dyslexia (DD) is currently in severe disarray because of the recent introduction of the phonological theory of its causation. Since mastering the phonological principle is essential for all reading, failure to do so cannot be used to distinguish DD from the many other causes of such failure. To overcome this problem, many new psychological, signal detection, and neurological theories have been introduced recently. All these new theories converge on the idea that DD is fundamentally caused by impaired signalling of the timing of the visual and auditory cues that are essential for reading. These are provided by large ‘magnocellular’ neurones which respond rapidly to sensory transients. The evidence for this conclusion is overwhelming. Especially convincing are intervention studies that have shown that improving magnocellular function improves dyslexic children’s reading, together with cohort studies that have demonstrated that the magnocellular timing deficit is present in infants who later become dyslexic, long before they begin learning to read. The converse of the magnocellular deficit in dyslexics may be that they gain parvocellular abundance. This may often impart the exceptional ‘holistic’ talents that have been ascribed to them and that society needs to nurture.

1. Introduction

The current definition of developmental dyslexia (DD) is highly unsatisfactory [ 1 ]. Even though it was accepted for over 100 years that some children have a genetically based impaired development of left hemisphere connections that normally mediate reading and spelling, yet their speech and oral comprehension develop normally, the introduction of the phonological theory of dyslexia means that it is now impossible for DD to be distinguished from other causes of failure to learn to read. Hence, some people now argue that it may not exist at all [ 2 ]. On the contrary, in this review of current theories about the causes of DD, I hope to convince the reader that the 19th Century. speculations about the existence of a developmental form of dyslexia have turned out to be absolutely correct and that most of the evidence accruing from modern advances in neuroscience supports this view.

The word ‘dyslexia’ was derived by Rudolph Berlin in 1884 [ 3 ] from the Greek ‘dys’ and ‘lexis’ (disordered words) to apply to patients in whom strokes had destroyed their ability to read and spell, yet left their speech and oral comprehension intact. We now call this ‘acquired’ dyslexia. A few years later, Hinshelwood [ 4 ] and Pringle Morgan [ 5 ] borrowed this concept to speculate that there might be a developmental form of dyslexia, which would explain why some children failed to develop the normal ‘connectome’ that mediates reading, despite developing normal speech and oral comprehension. They were well aware that this selective deficit implied that reading must employ at least some anatomically distinct pathways that are not used for speech and language comprehension. Recent functional imaging findings have confirmed their conjecture comprehensively [ 6 ]. They also recognised that developmental dyslexia was probably genetically based because of the strong family histories of reading difficulties in these children’s close relatives [ 7 ].

For over a century, developmental dyslexia was recognised by neurologists and other doctors as a useful diagnosis for which the key criteria were a significant discrepancy between a child’s backward reading, yet normal or high speech and oral comprehension and reasoning skills, together with a strong family history. However, since the turn of the millennium, this consensus has been thoroughly undermined.

2. Current Situation

First, responsibility for the diagnosis of DD transferred from medics to educational psychologists, because they became the first people to see potentially dyslexic children. In general, they were not trained in neuroscience and some became convinced that a diagnosis of DD failed to lead to any demonstrable improvement in teaching the recipients to learn to read. Thus, they began to react against the so called ‘medical model’ of reading difficulties and transferred their allegiance more to computational models that were often divorced from the neural machinery mediating them [ 8 ].

They were also highly influenced by the linguistic revolution introduced by Chomsky, in particular about the nature of phonemes [ 9 ]. To simplify, the essence of reading is to learn to translate letters into the sounds they stand for, which are ‘phonemes’. However, phonemes do not actually exist as a consistent, standard acoustic signal. Their acoustic form varies according to the preceding and succeeding sounds in the spoken word; thus, children have to learn a semi abstract concept, the ‘phonological principle’. Indeed, it turned out that children cannot learn it at all until they have learnt that the written forms of words consist visually of sequences of separate letters [ 10 ]. Only after this can they understand that the spoken form of a word can also be broken down into a sequence of sounds, phonemes, that the letters represent. Unlike speaking, this is not automatic; it is difficult, and most children have to be taught how it works. This new emphasis on phonology meant that DD became attributed entirely to failure to learn the phonological principle properly, and the ‘phonological theory’ of dyslexia became dominant [ 11 ].

Importantly, however, failure to master the phonological principle applies to all causes of failure to learn to read, not just to dyslexia. The majority of the 1 in 5 eighteen year olds who leave school unable to read as well as an average 11 year old, are not dyslexic, but they have been disadvantaged by a toxic combination of low general ability, poor teaching, lack of family support, truancy, and/or other social factors. The minority of these children who might be dyslexic cannot be distinguished from the socially disadvantaged on the basis of their phonological deficit alone [ 12 ].

On top of this, the classical criterion for DD of showing a discrepancy between reading and oral skills has been undermined by the claim that oral comprehension and non-verbal reading skills cannot be measured reliably. This has occurred despite a century of research into measures of general intelligence (‘g’) that have shown clearly that oral communication and non-verbal reasoning skills can indeed be accurately measured [ 13 ]. Nevertheless, dyslexia assessors have been advised that they should not try to use discrepancy criteria to diagnose dyslexia.

These factors—the takeover by psychologists, the emphasis on phonological awareness measures, and attacks on the discrepancy criterion—have left the diagnosis of developmental dyslexia in limbo, to such an extent that a sizeable number of educationalists have decided to abandon any attempt to diagnose it at all, because they have come to believe that DD does not exist. Yet, there is more and more research evidence that Hinshelwood and Morgan were correct. Developmental dyslexia does exist and a proper understanding of its causation should lead to better techniques for diagnosing and treating it.

3. New Theories

To overcome this confusion about how to diagnose dyslexia, a plethora of new theories about what causes it have been introduced. Any worthwhile theory should not only collect a summary of what we already know about the phenomenon, but it should also suggest its likely causes. The recent explosion of theories about DD is testament to how little we really know about the normal development of reading, let alone in developmental dyslexia. These new DD theories can be divided into 3 broad categories, psychological, signal processing, and neurological, but it is argued that only the latter can really provide useful pointers to likely causal brain mechanisms.

4. Phonological Theory of Dyslexia

The main psychological theory about dyslexia that has now assumed such dominance is the phonological theory. Its main weakness is that it is not really a theory at all in the sense of providing an explanation for the condition; it does not provide any hint as to its cause [ 12 ]. Indeed, the theory is almost a tautology, a circular argument, merely repeating using different words, that the children do not learn to read because they have not managed to acquire the phonological principle. However, every child who is failing to learn to read is failing to acquire the phonological principle. In order to help these children, we need to know in detail why each one of them fails to acquire it.

5. Rapid Automatised Naming (RAN) and the ‘Double Deficit’

In 1976, Martha Denckla discovered that people with true developmental dyslexia could be distinguished from poor reading from other causes, often called ‘garden variety poor readers’, by their slowness at ‘rapid automatised naming’ (RAN), i.e., being able to name out loud, as fast as possible, lists of letters, numbers, or pictures [ 14 ]. Maryanne Wolf then showed that this was not a phonological problem in the sense of learning the right phonemes, but that it was due to the slowed production of the correct sounds, i.e., it was a speech timing and fluency problem [ 15 ]. It then became clear that most dyslexics have this RAN deficit together with the phonological problems mentioned earlier. Thus, Maryanne introduced the ‘double deficit’ hypothesis [ 16 ]. Again, however, this is only descriptive and does not explain why dyslexics have these problems.

6. Reduced Visual Attention Span

Both Rudolph Berlin and Pringle Morgan thought that dyslexia was mainly a visual processing problem; thus, they often called it ‘word blindness’. However, since then, it has become clear that, in many dyslexic people, visual problems are not dominant. Nevertheless, it is now clear that reading starts with learning to sequence the letters in a word [ 10 ], and many children do have visual processing problems of various sorts [ 17 , 18 ]. Sylvianne Valdois advanced the hypothesis that dyslexics often may have a limited ‘visual attention span’ [ 19 ]. This is consistent with the increasing evidence showing that their deployment of visual attention is slow and less accurate [ 20 ], but again, by itself, this gives us no clue as what causes this deficit in visual attention, specifically in developmental dyslexia.

7. Visual Stress

Another suggestion is that many dyslexics suffer from ‘visual stress’, probably not as the main reason for their problems but often contributing to them [ 21 ]. Viewing high contrast, coarse (low spatial frequency), black and white stripes is quite uncomfortable for many people; the stripes can appear to move around, glare, or fade in some places and ‘strain’ the eyes, often causing eye and headaches. This is most likely because they overstimulate the system of visual neurones, the magnocellular timing system, which is responsible for rapidly signalling the moments when visual events occur. Some people are particularly sensitive to this kind of stimulus, and the black and white stripes formed by a page of text is precisely the kind of pattern that stimulates their visual systems maximally and may cause them discomfort. This appears to particularly be the case in some people with dyslexia. These uncomfortable symptoms can often be alleviated by viewing the page through coloured filters, most often deep yellow or deep blue, though there seems to be great individual variation, and there is much scepticism about whether these effects are purely placebo [ 22 ]. Again, however, clear as these symptoms are in some people, the visual stress theory offers no pointer to their causation.

8. Sensory Signal Processing

The next group of theories is concerned with signal processing aspects of reading. Any sensory system has the problem of isolating a signal of interest about what is going on outside the head from both ‘noise’ in the external environmental that can obscure the stimulus and also from internal noise, which is added to the signal at each stage by the brain’s own neural processing. Thus, a new theory about dyslexia is that each neural processing stage adds more noise than normal or is worse at separating the signal from the noise—the ‘noise exclusion hypothesis’ [ 23 , 24 ]. This is most easily demonstrated by the effects of distractors. Compared to typically developing readers, people with dyslexia have been found to be particularly poor at detecting stimuli in the presence of irrelevant distractors. Of course, the question then arises as to why they are so poor at ignoring the distractions. The answer, slow and inaccurate control of perceptual attention, brings us to the nature of attention, to which we will return.

Another theory involving signal processing limitations is that of ‘slowed Bayesian statistical learning’. This impedes the effective use of ‘priors’. Common experience of how a cause, a prior, is usually followed by the same effect, is routinely incorporated into our calculations to create an optimal program to achieve the skills required for reading and their successful automatization [ 25 ]. At present, there is not much evidence in favour of this hypothesis, and again it really only redescribes failure to acquire the necessary orthographic and phonological skills for reading; thus, it is not really a theory in the sense of suggesting the causes of these failures.

9. Sensory Temporal Processing

Another description of what is missing in a dyslexic person’s repertoire of reading skills is presented by the ‘temporal processing’ deficit theory. Nearly 40 years ago, Paula Tallal was the first to suggest that phonological weaknesses may actually be caused by an underlying auditory temporal processing deficit [ 26 ]. She revealed this by measuring in both the auditory and the visual modality the shortest gap that subjects could detect in an otherwise continuous stimulus (their gap detection threshold) or by judging the temporal order in which stimuli were presented. Such a temporal processing disorder in the visual or auditory domains, or both, has now been found in most people with developmental dyslexia [ 27 ]. Thus, it appears that impaired neural timing may be the actual root cause of developmental dyslexia itself, and so, we have to ask ourselves what the neural basis of this abnormality might be.

10. Neurological Theories

This brings us to the neurological theories attempting to explain the aetiology of developmental dyslexia. The 19th Century. originators of the concept clearly thought that it was due to failure to properly develop the specialised visual circuits underlying reading and spelling under genetic control. But we should not overemphasise the role of genetics. In both typically developing readers and dyslexics, their genes account for only half of the variation in their reading ability, and the environment they have experienced throughout childhood accounts for the remaining half. In other words, effective teaching at school and warm parental support, not just regarding reading but by providing a nurturing and encouraging home life, seem to be as important as heredity for typically developing readers and also for dyslexics. Nevertheless, all the evidence to date suggests that it is their genetic inheritance that sets the background to the failure of their reading connectome to develop properly [ 28 ].

11. The Reading ‘Connectome’

Successful development of the orthographic/phonological connectome seems to involve the repurposing of pre-existing connections, particularly in the left hemisphere, to mediate reading [ 29 ]. In people with dyslexia, however, their genetic inheritance seems to cause these new connections to fail to develop properly. Paulesu et al. described this, perhaps a little misleadingly, as a ‘disconnection’ syndrome [ 30 ]. This is misleading because it turned out that the problem is not the disconnection of previously established connections, but rather it is the failure to develop the correct specific connections for reading in the first place [ 31 ].

Most important developments in science have followed advances in methodology. The most significant recent technical advance in neuroscience has been the development of neuroimaging, in particular functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which has enabled regional transient increases in blood flow in the brain to be measured accurately in living subjects. Over a century ago, Roy and Sherrington showed that brain regions that are particularly active show increases in local blood flow [ 32 ], and modern advances in magnetic resonance techniques now allow us to follow these increases over time in courses of seconds in living subjects [ 33 ]. In addition, the introduction of ‘diffusion tensor analysis’ (DTI) has enabled the tracing of the ‘functional connectivity’ between regions, i.e., how the increased activity in one region is followed by increases elsewhere, presumably because of the activation of effective connections between them. Thus, the development of connections specifically mediating reading, the reading ‘connectome’, can now be followed in children by repeat imaging every few years [ 34 ]. These studies confirmed that Hinshelwood and Morgan were right. In developmental dyslexia, the specialised connections in the left hemisphere mediating reading fail to develop properly, although the precise nature of this disturbance may differ from individual to individual [ 35 ], and this applies particularly to differences between Chinese and alphabetic scripts [ 36 ].

12. The Cerebellum

Until recently, the magnets used for such imaging were only deep enough to image the cerebral cortex, but over the last few years, the brainstem and cerebellum have become included. In particular, these studies have demonstrated that the cerebellum plays a crucial role in the development of the reading connectome and of its operation in fluent readers [ 37 ]. Hence, as was first suggested by Fawcett and Nicolson [ 38 ], it seems that dyslexia is associated with reduced activity of the left cerebellum. Actually, it is probable that it is not the development of the cerebellum itself that is at fault, but rather the imprecision of the sensory timing inputs upon which its function depends [ 39 ].

The main function of the cerebellum is now believed to be to compute and maintain ‘internal models’ of movement in order to control the precise timing and force of the muscle actions required to achieve them skillfully and automatically [ 40 ]. These models depend on timing information supplied both directly by ascending projections from receptors in muscles and joints and from the visual, auditory, and somatosensory systems via the cerebral cortex. In humans, it is now clear that these internal models are not only used to control actual movements but also for thinking. ‘Thought is but movement confined to the Brain’, was Sherrington’s aphorism. For communication, speech, and reading, the internal models represented in the cerebellum may be used for cognition [ 41 ] to predict the consequences of potential movements without actually executing them in order to judge their likely outcome and, hence, suitability.

13. Temporal Processing Deficit

This brings us back to the temporal processing deficit theory of dyslexia. Our discussions of the many theories about the causes of developmental dyslexia all converge on the suggestion that the basic physiological mechanism that underlies it, and is therefore probably its root cause, is impaired temporal processing, but this term is too broad; it could cover anything from reading a clock to estimating a time interval. The studies that have contested the idea that DD has a temporal processing basis have often tested timing judgements [ 42 ], which are very different from the accurate signalling of the timing of events. We must therefore specify more precisely which timing functions are actually required for reading. Accurate signalling of the timing of when the eyes or visual attention alight on each letter in the written word is what is essential for determining the sequence of letters in the word [ 43 ]. Likewise, signalling the precise time at which each phoneme is heard enables the order of the sounds in the spoken word to be correctly sequenced [ 44 ]. Thus, the precise timing of these visual and auditory events is crucial for sequencing the letters and sounds in a word correctly, and imprecision of these magnocellular timing signals may underlie all the manifestations of dyslexia that we have considered.

This is not the place to discuss the wide variety of genetic, biochemical, anatomical, physiological, psychophysical, and behavioural evidence that justifies this conclusion, as it has been reviewed in detail several times recently [ 43 , 45 , 46 , 47 ]. Instead, here, we discuss two of the most common arguments questioning the timing deficit theory, namely its failure to explain the allegedly selective phonological deficit in DD, and the ‘chicken vs. egg’ problem—what is the direction of cause vs. effect?

The phonological theory of DD posits that it is due to a specific inability to grasp the phonological principle, specific in the sense that it is the development of the concept of phonemes itself that is affected and nothing to do with the quality of the sensory inputs that underlie its development. However, as noted earlier, everybody who fails to learn to read, whether dyslexic or not, has failed to grasp the phonological concept because only those who have grasped it can learn to read, i.e., it is inherent in learning to read. Thus, failure to do so cannot be used to distinguish dyslexics from those for whom social disadvantage has caused their difficulty with learning to read [ 12 ]. Furthermore, labelling dyslexics as having a phonological weakness is very likely to subject them to a rigorous teaching regime consisting of systematic phonics, which may not help them at all [ 48 ]. What we need to do is to discover what is causing each failure so that we can concentrate our efforts on what might help each of them individually, whether or not they are dyslexic.

14. Chicken or Egg?

The question of which is chicken and which is egg, i.e., the direction of cause vs. effect, permeates much of the discussion about causes of dyslexia [ 49 ] and whether dyslexia can be reliably distinguished from the other more numerous causes of reading failure. It is often argued that the sensory deficits that we have been discussing could be the consequence rather than the cause of dyslexic children’s failure to learn to read because they simply have not had so much reading experience, and thus, their sensory systems have not been ‘tuned up’ for reading [ 50 ].

15. Cohort Studies

Undoubtedly, learning to read must have an effect on the connections underlying it, which is the whole point of education, but there is now abundant evidence that the direction of cause and effect is mainly early congenital brain anomalies that cause sensory processing deficits, in turn causing reading difficulties much later. The most powerful way of determining the direction of causality in these circumstances is to use a ‘cohort study’, i.e., to follow a cohort of children who are at genetic risk of dyslexia from before they begin to learn to read to age 7 or 8. At this latter time, about half the children will be reading well, having not inherited vulnerability genes; the other half will be failing. Two detailed studies of this sort were undertaken in Holland and in Finland. They both showed that neurological differences manifest themselves in infants and, even in new born babies, in those who are going to go on to become dyslexic later on.

In the Dutch study of children at family risk, habituation to a simple visual stimulus, which was neither alphabetic nor even letter-like, measured by visual evoked potentials at the age of 4 predicted whether the child would be identified as dyslexic by the age of 8 [ 51 ]. In other words, these children were clearly exhibiting visual processing abnormalities long before they began to learn to read, and these led to their later reading failure. This is strong evidence that their visual processing was the main cause of their reading problems, rather than vice versa.

In the case of the Finnish studies, when imaged in their mothers’ wombs even before birth, auditory processing anomalies were seen in the infants who later turned out to become dyslexic [ 52 ]. The magnitude of these abnormalities predicted the amount of the phonological deficit these children eventually experienced at age 8. Thus, this study provided yet more strong evidence that congenital brain abnormalities caused the later reading problems.

Both Dutch and Finnish are ‘transparent’ languages, i.e., their spelling translates into their sounds reliably. In English, on the other hand, 50% of common words are irregularly spelled, and thus, their spelling does not indicate how they should be pronounced. Instead, their visual form must be remembered. Therefore, too much emphasis on phonics at the expense of visual whole word recognition does not help many English dyslexics, but it could be argued that, whilst pre-reading brain differences have been clearly shown for Finnish and Dutch dyslexics, the same has not been shown for English or, as an example of an even more ‘irregular’ script, Chinese. Although detailed dyslexia cohort studies have not been completed for English or Chinese children as yet, already there is enough circumstantial evidence to be confident that, for these two scripts, sensory processing deficits in infancy precede and predict reading failure much later [ 49 , 53 ].

16. Intervention Studies

Another way of settling the direction of cause and effect for sensory performance is to see whether an intervention that improves it is followed by improved reading, with appropriate controls for placebo effects. Teri Lawton developed a technique based on the known properties of the M-system for training poor readers with an initially weak M-system [ 54 ]. She uses a low-contrast, low-spatial frequency, moving grating presented against a static background grating of higher contrast and spatial frequency. Subjects report the direction of motion whilst the program iteratively reduces the contrast of the moving grating as their threshold for correct responses improves. This training procedure greatly helps the children to improve their M-sensitivity. At the same time, she measures the children’s current motion sensitivity, how this improves with her training, and whether this enhances their reading progress. This procedure has shown clearly that this M-cell training helps the majority of dyslexic children improve their M-sensitivity and thereby make considerable progress with their reading [ 55 ]. These results provide convincing evidence that their improved M-function was what enabled their improved reading, rather than the other way around.

17. Is Developmental Dyslexia Multifactorial?

Taken together, these cohort and intervention studies have clearly established that impairments in temporal processing precede a child’s failing to learn to read. Therefore, they support the hypothesis that timing disorder contributes causally to the children’s failure. There are a number of studies at a psychological level, however, that suggest that reading failure is multifactorial and that there is unlikely to be a single mechanism underlying dyslexia. It is certainly true that some people with DD have more visual problems, while others have more auditory problems or a mixture of both, but as explained earlier, these differences probably derive from a basic temporal deficit that affects these two systems to different extents in different individuals for unknow reasons. Clearly, these need further research.

In general, studies that set up a psychological level statistical model fail to take into account the underlying neuroscience involved. To take a specific example, O’Brien and Yeatman [ 56 ] confirmed that a phonological deficit cannot explain all aspects of DD but went on to define three orthogonal visual, phonological, and decision-making clusters that are statistically partially independent. However, this approach ignores the well-evidenced dependence of phonological skills on visual letter sequencing [ 10 ], and the evidence that, in individuals, their visual timing deficits predict their auditory ones [ 57 ]. Analogous arguments may apply to other such models [ 58 , 59 ].

18. Parvocellular Proliferation

Most of the evidence considered so far supports the idea that the impaired development of magnocellular timing neurones in the brain is the ultimate cause of developmental dyslexia. Hence, this deficit underlies all the theories we considered above. The converse of this is that other neurones may be able to proliferate to fill the space vacated by the absent magnocells. More than 90% of the new neurones born in the foetal brain in the last few months of pregnancy fail to thrive and are eliminated jn early infancy because they fail to make successful and useful connections [ 60 ]. This means that the most numerous neurones, parvocells (parvus, Latin for small), may be able to flourish more than usual. Since parvocells are normally more extensively connected than magnocells, their superabundance in dyslexia implies that their connectivity might be even greater. Thus, the magnocellular timing deficit could be matched by a superabundance of parvocells in DD.

Although there is not so much evidence in favour of this proposition because most studies look for deficits in dyslexic brains, not strengths, there are a number of studies that have shown clearly that people with dyslexia have superior performance on tests that specifically assess parvocellular functions. For example, in the same studies in which Lovegrove showed dyslexics to have lower magnocellular sensitivity than ordinary readers to high temporal but low spatial frequency modulated gratings, he showed that they actually had a much higher sensitivity to parvocellular stimuli (high-spatial but low-temporal frequency gratings) [ 61 ]. Thus, whilst dyslexics have reduced steady state visual evoked potentials at magnocellular frequencies, they have enhanced responses at parvocellular frequencies [ 62 ]. Others have shown dyslexics to have better red and green colour discrimination, particularly in the peripheral visual field [ 63 ]. Likewise, they have shown to have better detail vision in the periphery of the visual field [ 64 ]. Thus, there is clear evidence that dyslexics may develop larger numbers of parvocells particularly in the visual field outside of the fovea.

19. Positive Dyslexia

There is also a large, mainly anecdotal, literature suggesting that people with dyslexia are overrepresented compared to ordinary brains in a specific set of professions, namely aesthetic and artistic, entrepreneurial businesses, practical engineering, and mathematics and computing. There is a long list of famous and exceptionally talented probable dyslexics, ranging from Caesar Augustus [ 65 ], via Leonardo da Vinci [ 66 ], to Einstein, Winston Churchill, and Stephen Spielberg. On the face of it, there is nothing obvious to link their varied occupations together. One suggestion is that dyslexics take refuge in professions that do not require much reading, but nowadays, every profession carries a large load of literature. Actually, if dyslexics avoid it as much as possible, this could not explain why they are often so successful in those professions. In fact, this argument leads to the possible conclusion that dyslexics may actually be inherently more talented and creative in these pursuits.

20. Creativity

Clearly, the next question must be: might these creative talents derive from dyslexics’ superabundance of parvocells? It is often suggested that people with dyslexia are constitutionally more creative than others, but the most widely used assessment of creativity, the Torrance test, was not developed with the properties of parvocells in mind. Hence, most studies have found that dyslexics are more creative in some aspects of life but not in others. Thus, overall, these studies have failed to demonstrate that dyslexics are more creative than ordinary people.

21. Impossible Figures

However, there are a few tasks in which dyslexics have been reliably found to be faster and more accurate than non-dyslexics. ‘Impossible’ figures are drawings of objects that cannot exist in reality, such as the impossible stairs and waterfalls depicted by M.C. Escher or Schuster’s impossible trident. When asked to decide whether drawings of objects were physically possible or impossible, Von Károlyi found that dyslexics were much faster and more accurate in this task [ 67 ]. Male dyslexics have also been shown to be particularly good at identifying shapes in ambiguous figures, remembering and reproducing designs and complex figures, and at recreating and navigating in a virtual environment [ 68 ].

The next obvious question therefore is whether the tasks in which dyslexics do show clear superiority are ones that particularly call on parvocellular function. As we have seen, dyslexics’ P-cell advantage probably gives them a wider and better detail vision of pattern and colour, particularly in the periphery. Thus, they can often pick up more detail over a wider area in an instant than ordinary brains can. This is often called ‘holistic’ vision because its possessors can see a larger scene in detail at a glance. It is also sometimes called ‘helicopter’ vision, which means to be able to imagine a whole scene from above in all its elements and all its detail and, hence, to be able to discern what ordinary, more tunnel-vision, brains might fail to see. Even more importantly, this can enable many dyslexics to spot anomalies in a pattern that may indicate weakness or error. Given this holistic skill, it is not surprising that people with dyslexia can see all Escher’s waterfalls at once and quickly decide that they could not work together. Likewise, they may be able to see both ends of Schuster’s trident simultaneously and to quickly determine that it has three elements at one end, but only two at the other end, and thus is physically impossible to exist [ 67 ]. Likewise, successfully discerning shapes in indistinct pictures would be greatly assisted by the holistic vision presentation of the whole drawing simultaneously [ 68 ].

22. Auditory ‘Parvocellular’ Perception

Both auditory and visual timing systems are affected in dyslexia; hence, parvocells may proliferate in both. What might the perceptual advantage be that is imparted by dyslexics possessing increased numbers of auditory parvocells that would be analogous to their gaining holistic vision? As for the visual cortex, dual magnocellular and parvocellular streams pass forward in the brain from the primary auditory cortex [ 69 ]. The auditory magnocellular timing stream in dyslexics is compromised, which is why they tend to be poor at picking up rhythm [ 70 ], but they are better, for example, at detecting the combination of components in a musical chord [ 71 ]. This holistic perception of music seems to bestow on them a better appreciation of the coloration, timbre, and emotional tone of music, and it enables some to take in the whole structure of a tune or harmony all at once. Thus, even though they usually have great trouble sight reading, they can often remember a whole tune immediately and reproduce it correctly on the piano or guitar. Thus, whilst dyslexia puts obstacles in the way of learning to read music, it nevertheless assists some to become celebrated musicians.

23. Abstract Cognitive Style

The observations that follow are difficult to test scientifically because the skills involved are so rare that tests for them have not been developed. It would be best to treat them as speculations at present. Metacognition is ‘thinking about how you think’. It seems that parvocellular proliferation in dyslexics may confer on them a distinctive metacognitive style that is holistic in an abstract sense. Many seem to be able to take into account all the elements of a problem or situation together and thereby see clearly which fit together into a recognisable pattern and which do not. For example, dyslexics are notoriously good at judging personality, taking all factors into account simultaneously, not just one at a time, and coming to accurate conclusions. This cognitive style fosters ‘lateral thinking’, originality, creativity, inventiveness, and seeing every element of a problem all at once. Einstein was famous for his even more abstract mind set; he is said to have been able to see patterns in 10 or 12 dimensions, imagine their outcomes, and thus predict their unexpected properties.

24. Conclusions

More than a century ago, the concept of developmental dyslexia was introduced, but it is now under sustained attack because the now-dominant phonological theory of its causation fails to distinguish DD from the many other possible causes of failure to learn to read. However, our consideration of the many and varied theories of its causation that have recently been introduced converges on the simple idea that underlying all of them is imprecise signalling by magnocellular neurones of the timing of the visual and auditory events involved in reading. This timing deficit can distinguish dyslexia from other causes of reading failure that do not show such timing problems. The converse of this magnocellular deficit in dyslexia may be parvocellular proliferation in them, which has also been clearly demonstrated. This compensation may explain ‘positive’ dyslexia, which is the exceptional creative, artistic, entrepreneurial, communication, and engineering talents that some dyslexics display, and it emphasises that dyslexic talents should be valued, prioritised, and nurtured. The unsustainability of the modern world needs their imagination, innovation, and creativity to help us survive [ 72 ].

Acknowledgments

Much of my work discussed here was carried out over the past 40 years with the help of a large number of colleagues and students, too numerous to name individually. My heartfelt thanks to all of you. My thanks are also due to Oxford University, the MRC, the Wellcome, Rodin Remediation, Esmee Fairbairn, BBC Children in Need, Tolkien, Garfield Weston and Dyslexia Research Trusts for funding my research. I would also like to thank MDPI for subsidising its publication here.

Funding Statement

This research received no external funding.

Informed Consent Statement

Data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

I declare no conflict of interest.

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87 Dyslexia Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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• Dyslexia in White Females Ages 5-10 According to the article, Learning difficulties are one of the many consequences of Dyslexia. Children with Dyslexia are more likely to experience learning challenges if their siblings and parents suffer from the same condition.
• Dyslexia Tutoring and Assessment Reflection Thus, a detailed study of this course, analysis of student assessment tools and special training programs allowed me to rethink my approach to teaching children in many ways and realize the problems of children with […]
• Kurzweil-3000 for Students With Dyslexia The user can then opt to read through the text continuously or at a comfortable pace with the help of the voice features.
• Dyslexia Disorder: Characteristics and Services Primary dyslexia is a kind of dyslexia disorder which is caused by dysfunction of cerebral cortex of the brain and the condition is not normally affected by change in growth development.
• Role of Behavioral Science in Treatment of Dyslexia and Dyscalculia The goal of this area of psychology is to understand the processes of perception of information for the treatment of diseases and disorders associated with their impairment.
• Dyslexia Students and Their Inclusion Needs Carrington highlights the need to foster a culture that allows students with special needs to function optimally in the mainstream education system.
• Dyslexia and Intervention in American Schools According to Enns and Lafond, learning to read and write for the students with ear problems is a big challenge not only to themselves but also to the teachers themselves.
• Assistive Technology for High School Students with Dyslexia The study query being dealt with is, “Can assistive technologies meet the requirements of dyslexic high school students when it comes to writing assignments?” The first part of this proposal details the underlying literature to […]
• Dyslexia: Definition, Causes, Characteristics It is also supposed to be genetic and those with the history of the condition are supposedly a 23-65 percent likelihood of having a child with dyslexia.
• ADHD and Dyslexia: Supporting Children and Adults With Learning Difficulties
• Categorical and Dimensional Diagnoses of Dyslexia: Are They Compatible?
• Children With Dyslexia and Familial Risk for Dyslexia Present Atypical Development of the Neuronal Phonological Network
• Developmental Dyslexia and Dysgraphia: What Can We Learn From the One About the Other?
• Dyslexia and the Problem of Awareness Training for Teachers and Managers
• Dyslexia: Educational Psychology and Modern Imaging Tools
• Varieties of Developmental Dyslexia
• Understanding Developmental Dyslexia: Linking Perceptual and Cognitive Deficits to Reading Processes
• Education Provision for Adolescents With Autistic Spectrum Disorders, Asperger’s Syndrome, Dyslexia and ADHD
• An Evaluation of the Discrepancy Definition of Dyslexia
• Cytoarchitectonic Abnormalities in Developmental Dyslexia
• Defining and Understanding Dyslexia: Past, Present and Future
• From Genes to Behavior in Developmental Dyslexia
• Neurobiology of Dyslexia: A Reinterpretation of the Data
• On the Bases of Two Subtypes of Development Dyslexia
• Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level
• Developmental Dyslexia in Women: Neuropathological Findings
• Early Identification and Interventions for Dyslexia
• The Neurological Basis of Developmental Dyslexia: An Overview and Working Hypothesis
• Theories on the Development of Dyslexia: An Analysis of Several Cases of Dyslexia in Adults
• How Do the Spellings of Children With Dyslexia Compare With Those of Nondyslexic Children?
• Neuroanatomical Markers for Dyslexia: A Review of Dyslexia Structural Imaging Studies
• Characteristics of Developmental Dyslexia in a Regular Writing System
• Lesioning an Attractor Network: Investigations of Acquired Dyslexia
• Prevalence and Clinical Characteristics of Dyslexia in Primary School Students
• Functional Disruption in the Organization of the Brain for Reading in Dyslexia
• Dyslexia: A New Synergy Between Education and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Evidence for Major Gene Transmission of Developmental Dyslexia
• Developmental Dyslexia in Different Languages: Language-Specific or Universal?
• Predictors of Developmental Dyslexia in European Orthographies With Varying Complexity
• Recent Discoveries in Remedial Interventions for Children With Dyslexia
• Phonology, Reading Development, and Dyslexia: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective
• Developmental Dyslexia in Chinese and English Populations: Dissociating the Effect of Dyslexia From Language Differences
• Paying Attention to Reading: The Neurobiology of Reading and Dyslexia
• Disruption of Posterior Brain Systems for Reading in Children With Developmental Dyslexia
• Tackling the “Dyslexia Paradox”: Reading Brain and Behavior for Early Markers of Developmental Dyslexia
• Dyslexia as a Phonological Deficit: Evidence and Implications
• Grammatical Spelling and Written Syntactic Awareness in Children With and Without Dyslexia
• Inhibition and Updating, but Not Switching, Predict Developmental Dyslexia and Individual Variation in Reading Ability
• Dyslexia and Inclusion: Classroom Approaches for Assessment, Teaching and Learning
• What Is the Impact of Dyslexia on Academic Performance?
• What Subtypes of Dyslexia Exist?
• What Causes Orthographic Dyslexia?
• Are Categorical and Dimensional Diagnoses of Dyslexia Compatible?
• What Are the Causes of Dyslexia?
• What Is the Treatment for Dyslexia?
• What Are the Difficulties Associated With Dyslexia?
• What Part of the Brain Is Responsible for Dyslexia?
• What Are the Learning Strategies for Children With Dyslexia?
• What Controversial Dyslexia Treatments Are There?
• What Examples of a Research Paper About Dyslexia Can You Give?
• How Does Eye Tracking Machine Learning Detect Dyslexic Readers?
• What Are Collective Screening Tools for Early Detection of Dyslexia?
• What Are the Things in Common Between Dyslexia, Dysgraphia, and Dyscalculia?
• How Do Genetic Mutations Lead To Developmental Dyslexia?
• What Are the Behavioral Characteristics of Dyslexia?
• What Strategies Can Be Used to Help People With Dyslexia?
• What Are the Teaching Methods for Students With Dyslexia?
• How Does Dyslexia Affect Learning?
• Is Dyslexia a Barrier to Learning Languages?
• Can Music Be Used as a Rehabilitation Method for Dyslexia?
• How Does Dyslexia Affect Quality of Life?
• What Problems Do Teachers Have When Teaching Children With Dyslexia?
• What Are the Symptoms of Dyslexia?
• How Are Orthographic and Phonology Related to Dyslexia?
• What Are the Misconceptions and Myths About Dyslexia?
• What Is the Latest Research on Dyslexia?
• What Are the Most Common Problems of Children With Dyslexia?
• Who Is the Most Famous Person With Dyslexia?
• What Kinds of Jobs Are Good for Dyslexics?
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IvyPanda. (2023, September 19). 87 Dyslexia Essay Topic Ideas & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/dyslexia-essay-topics/

"87 Dyslexia Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." IvyPanda , 19 Sept. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/dyslexia-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2023) '87 Dyslexia Essay Topic Ideas & Examples'. 19 September.

IvyPanda . 2023. "87 Dyslexia Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." September 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/dyslexia-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "87 Dyslexia Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." September 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/dyslexia-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "87 Dyslexia Essay Topic Ideas & Examples." September 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/dyslexia-essay-topics/.

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09-05-24 - Learn how AI rapidly improves reading skills for students with dyslexia, ADHD and autism with BuddyBooks

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About the Program

Target Audience:  Special Educators, Dyslexia Interventionists, Reading Specialists, Administrators

Participants will Learn:

• Learners will identify how state-of-the-art technology and research are combined to provide engaging and effective oral reading practice.
• Learners will identify 2 state-of-the-art technologies and 3 peer-reviewed research strands that make using AI based co-reading viable and feasible.
• Learners will identify 2 methods of computer-based remediation that have been demonstrated to improve oral reading prosody.

About the Presenter

Jason Stewart - ObjectiveEd

Jason is Director of Customer Success for ObjectiveEd. He is a former teacher, educational diagnostician, and district level administrator with over 20 years of educational experience. His passion for education is now focused on helping students achieve their best educational outcomes through educational technology. Jason has a master’s in special education from the University of Texas at Tyler.

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CART captioning is provided for all SCATP webinars. If you need an additional accommodation to participate, please contact us at least one week prior to the webinar via   e-mail   or by phone at 803-935-5263. 

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