Dyslexia :: essays research papers

DYSLEXIA AND THE PHONOLOGICAL MODELOver bingle hundred years ago, in November 1896, a doctor in Sussex, England, publish the first description of the learning disorder that would come to be cognise as developmental dyslexia. "Percy F.,... aged 14,... has always been a bright and profound boy," wrote W. Pringle Morgan in the "British Medical Journal," "quick at games, and in no way inferior to others of his age. His great difficulty has been--and is now--his inability to learn to read. (Sec 3) In that brief introduction, Morgan captured the illness that has intrigued and frustrated scientists for a century. In 2000 as in 1896, reading ability is taken as a substitute for information most people assume that if someone is smart, motivated and schooled, he or she will learn to read. But the experience of millions of dyslexics, like Percy F., has shown that assumption to be false. In dyslexia, the relation between intelligence and reading ability breaks down. az oic historys of dyslexia in the 1920s, held that defects in the visual system were to blame for the reversals of letters and manner of speaking thought to typify dyslexic reading. Eye training was often positively charged to overcome these alleged visual defects. Later research has shown, however, that children with dyslexia are non unusually prone to reversing letters or words and that the deficit amenable for the disorder is related to the actors line system. In particular, dyslexia reflects a deficiency in the processing of the typical linguistic units, called phonemes that make up all talk and written words. Current linguistic models of reading and dyslexia now provide an explanation of why some very intelligent people have solicitude learning to read and performing other language-related tasks. Over the past twenty dollar bill years, a consistent model of dyslexia has emerged that is based on phonological processing. The phonological model is consistent both with the cl inical symptoms of dyslexia and with what neuroscientists know about brilliance organization and function. To understand how the phonological model works, one first has to take in the way in which language is processed in the brain. Researchers theorize the language system as a hierarchical series of modules or components, all(prenominal) devoted to a particular aspect of language. At the upper levels of the hierarchy are components involved with semantics (vocabulary or word meaning), syntax (grammatical structure) and discourse (connected sentences). At the lowest level of the hierarchy is the phonological module, which is dedicated to processing the distinctive sound elements that constitute language.