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Bringing Neuroscience, Creativity, and Innovation to those that support students with dyslexia.

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Description

Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC users and Dragon Dictate for Mac users is another technological aid that facilitates the learning process for the dyslexic student and creates greater efficiency at the workplace. For those who have word-retrieval difficulties, grapho-motor weaknesses, or problems committing ideas to paper in a timely fashion, Dragon may be just the tool needed in order to improve writing skills. Dragon is a speech-recognition program that can be used to, among other things, dictate answers to homework questions, a five-paragraph essay, or even to write a novel. You can dictate an e-mail, surf the web using voice commands, or dictate on your Blackberry, iPhone, iPad or iPad touch.

Users dictate ideas and watch their words appear on the computer screen. Put on your headphones, load Dragon software onto your computer, and follow the required series of steps to create your own user profile. As part of this process you will need to read for roughly five minutes so that the software recognizes your voice. This is an important step because it establishes your initial accuracy. You are allowed to choose from a menu of readings that range from easy to more challenging. If your dyslexia negatively impacts your ability to read the selections, it is recommended that someone preview challenging words with you, so that you are familiar with them and can read them accurately when training.

When creating a user profile, Dragon will analyze your e-mails and documents in order to learn more about the vocabulary that you use. At any time you can add vocabulary by training words and you can create new words that stand for specific expressions you commonly use. Just go to view/edit where you can add the written form of the word and then the spoken form if it is different. For example, if you are writing a play and you want to write Act IV, you can add this to the written form and then put "act four" under the spoken form column and train it as such. Every time you say "act four" it will appear on the screen as Act IV. This works particularly well with unusual names and acronyms. In order to produce well-written documents it is important to learn the series of commands that make Dragon work most effectively. Commands such as "Cap that," "Underline that," and "New line" can be found on the Dragon Sidebar which automatically opens on the right-hand side of the screen. The Sidebar displays the most popular commands and can be docked anywhere or it can be hidden if you would like. It is important to familiarize yourself with the commands as you will need to know them.

Turn the microphone on and begin dictating. Dragon will automatically format certain kinds of text, such as dates, times, and percentages, and it will also begin sentences with capital letters and capitalize proper nouns it recognizes. However, you will have to tell Dragon when to capitalize other words, use commas, conclude sentences with punctuation, begin new paragraphs, etc. For example, if you dictate the sentence "I am headed to Meeting Street School to play basketball with Sam, Sandy and Will.", you will need to say "I am headed to "cap" meeting "cap" street "cap" school to play basketball with Sam "comma", "cap" sandy and "cap" will "period." Dragon will not know that Sandy and Will are proper nouns. While this may seem challenging initially, these commands will become second nature. In fact, you are likely to become more proficient with punctuation because you talk about it so often. If you struggle to use punctuation accurately, you can check the auto-formatting option in Dragon's Tool menu. Dragon will automatically add periods and commas if you would like.

As you dictate, Dragon will make errors, it just happens. Some of the errors will be your fault-perhaps you spoke too quickly, slurred your words or did not pronounce a word clearly. It is important to listen to the error in order to determine if the error was Dragon's or yours. For example, if you say the word nice and it wrote mice, highlight the word and say "correct that." You will then hear what you said and be able to determine the nature of the error. If it is Dragon's error, you should train the word, which entails repeating the word, so that the software program will recognize the correct pronunciation. If the error is your fault, because you misspoke or mispronounced the word, simply repeat the word and continue. It is well worth training words because it strengthens your vocabulary and helps Dragon work more efficiently.

What We've Observed

In order to learn more about Dragon Naturally Speaking, YCDC asked six students to use the voice-activated software for six weeks. Five of the students were PC users and one was a Mac user. Each was given the Dragon DVD, a pair of headphones and 90 minutes of training. They also had access to the Nuance - Getting Started Tutorial; Ask the Dictator - You Tube; Getting Started with Dragon Video; and the on-line version of Dragon Speaking End User Notebook Version 11. In order to monitor each student's progress, they were contacted weekly by the YCDC consultant who conducted the training.

The students provided some very interesting anecdotal information about how Dragon impacted them in unforeseen ways. One seventh grader had a history of written language weaknesses and he was challenging to understand because he spoke so quickly. During training he was told that if he did not slow down the rate at which he spoke, it was likely that Dragon would not be beneficial, as the program would not understand his speech. He laughed and admitted that his teachers and mother constantly tell him to slow down, because they do not always understand him. When speaking to this young man after the second week of training, he said, "I can do my homework so much faster. This is just unbelievable, I love it." He went on to say that, "My teacher even noticed that I am speaking more clearly. She said that I am speaking slower." His enthusiasm for Dragon never waned; each week that we spoke he raved about the program, commented about how quickly he could now complete his work and how his writing was getting stronger every day. His comments were uplifting: He embraced this technology and it changed the way in which he viewed the writing process. No longer was it a burden and, instead, it was a pleasure.

A senior in high school, who has a history of dysgraphia and a dislike for writing, found the process of dictating far easier than trying to commit his ideas to paper with a pencil or a pen. Because he did not have many papers during the six week project, he took time to "fool around." He said, "If you had no hands you could use this to navigate the entire web. You can open explorer, move the mouse, talk out e-mails and even customize the command bar." This young man spent time exploring the program and felt that the "tutorials were not very good" which resulted in his having to discover Dragon's various uses on his own. Another student said, "Dragon isn't as Mac friendly as it is PC friendly. I would make Dragon easier to use for Macs (mac users)." Another adult affiliated with the project experienced similar difficulty learning Dragon on a Mac.

Overview
Quick Points:
2 days to 4 weeks to learn how to use

Most popular use: writing papers

Middle schoolers, and upward will find this program helpful with their home assignments.

Dragon Naturally Speaking is a dication software that helps students and professionals alike. While initially it takes a bit of time to get started using the software proficiently, Dragon will save its user a lot of time. The students in our study learned the software in anywhere from a day or two to a month, with most getting the hang of it in a few weeks. While Dragon gets trained to a single voice per user, multiple users are allowed; however, each user must train independently from one another. Dragon shines as a tool for writing papers, or other homework that involves notetaking. Dragon users can also craft emails using the same word processing technology.

From Our Technology Study Consultant

I have been using Dragon Naturally Speaking for over 10 years. I can remember when creating a user profile required lengthy amounts of reading, and it was common for multiple mistakes to occur in just one sentence. This resulted in my having to spend a substantial amount of time training words. This is no longer the case. Creating a user profile takes all of 7 minutes and rarely do I make dictation errors. Dictating becomes a natural way of communicating in a short period of time. After roughly a week of using Dragon every day, you should be able to dictate with ease. Over the years I have found that the speed at which I speak has slowed moderately and that my ability to retrieve and organize language has improved. I like being able to go back to what I have written, read my work a second time and make any changes I deem necessary. When dictating, I use Dragon Pad, which saves directly to Microsoft Word. You can also dictate directly into most programs, including Word Perfect. Dragon shortens the time it takes me to write by at least 40 percent, as I can speak more rapidly than I can write or type. Having used Dragon for over 10 years, it has become the way that I write. Shifting back to handwriting or using the keyboard is no longer an option for me. Dictating is simply a better way.

Caryl Frankenberger, Ed.M.

For more than 25 years, Caryl Frankenberger, Ed.M., has been providing educational services to families in the US and abroad. A Harvard Graduate School educated psycho-educational diagnostician, school placement consultant, Cogmed coach and learning disabilities specialist. Caryl has evaluated over 2,500 children, adolescents and young adults.

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Dragon Naturally Speaking - Yale Dyslexia

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This aid can help dyslexics at school and work.

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This tool captures writing and records audio.

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Elizabeth S Norton, Sara D Beach, John DE Gabrieli, Neurobiology of dyslexia, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Volume 30, 2015, Pages 73-78, ISSN 0959-4388,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2014.09.007.

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Researchers are continually conducting studies to learn more about the causes of dyslexia, early identification of dyslexia, and the most effective treatments for dyslexia.
Developmental dyslexia is associated with difficulty in processing the orthography (the written form) and phonology (the sound structure) of language. As a way to understand the origin of these problems, neuroimaging studies have examined brain anatomy and function of people with and without dyslexia. These studies are also contributing to our understanding of the role of the brain in dyslexia, which can provide useful information for developing successful reading interventions and pinpointing certain genes that may also be involved.

What is brain imaging?

A number of techniques are available to visualize brain anatomy and function. A commonly used tool is magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which creates images that can reveal information about brain anatomy (e.g., the amount of gray and white matter, the integrity of white matter), brain metabolites (chemicals used in the brain for communication between brain cells), and brain function (where large pools of neurons are active). Functional MRI (fMRI) is based on the physiological principle that activity in the brain (where neurons are "firing") is associated with an increase of blood flow to that specific part of the brain. The MRI signal bears indirect information about increases in blood flow. From this signal, researchers infer the location and amount of activity that is associated with a task, such as reading single words, that the research participants are performing in the scanner. Data from these studies are typically collected on groups of people rather than individuals for research purposes only-not to diagnose individuals with dyslexia.

Which brain areas are involved in reading?

Since reading is a cultural invention that arose after the evolution of modern humans, no single location within the brain serves as a reading center. Instead, brain regions that sub serve other functions, such as spoken language and object recognition, are redirected (rather than innately specified) for the purpose of reading (Dehaene & Cohen, 2007). Reading involves multiple cognitive processes, two of which have been of particular interest to researchers: 1) grapheme-phoneme mapping in which combinations of letters (graphemes) are mapped onto their corresponding sounds (phonemes) and the words are thus "decoded," and 2) visual word form recognition for mapping of familiar words onto their mental representations. Together, these processes allow us to pronounce words and gain access to meaning. In accordance with these cognitive processes, studies in adults and children have demonstrated that reading is supported by a network of regions in the left hemisphere (Price, 2012), including the occipito-temporal, temporo-parietal, and inferior frontal cortices. The occipito-temporal cortex holds the "visual word form area." Both the temporo-parietal and inferior frontal cortices play a role in phonological and semantic processing of words, with inferior frontal cortex also involved in the formation of speech sounds. These areas have been shown to change as we age (Turkeltaub, et al., 2003) and are altered in people with dyslexia (Richlan et al., 2011).

What have brain images revealed about brain structure in dyslexia?

Evidence of a connection between dyslexia and the structure of the brain was first discovered by examining the anatomy of brains of deceased adults who had dyslexia during their lifetimes. The left-greater-than-right asymmetry typically seen in the left hemisphere temporal lobe (planum temporale) was not found in these brains (Galaburda & Kemper, 1979), and ectopias (a displacement of brain tissue to the surface of the brain) were noted (Galaburda, et al., 1985). Then investigators began to use MRI to search for structural images in the brains of research volunteers with and without dyslexia. Current imaging techniques have revealed less gray and white matter volume and altered white matter integrity in left hemisphere occipito-temporal and temporo-parietal areas. Researchers are still investigating how these findings are influenced by a person's language and writing systems.

What have brain images revealed about brain function in dyslexia?

Early functional studies were limited to adults because they employed invasive techniques that require radioactive materials. The field of human brain mapping greatly benefited from the invention of fMRI. fMRI does not require the use of radioactive tracers, so it is safe for children and adults and can be used repeatedly which facilitates longitudinal studies of development and intervention. First used to study dyslexia in 1996 (Eden et al., 1996), fMRI has since been widely used to study the brain's role in reading and its components (phonology, orthography, and semantics). Studies from different countries have converged in findings of altered left-hemisphere areas (Richlan et al., 2011), including ventral occipito-temporal, temporo-parietal, and inferior frontal cortices (and their connections). Results of these studies confirm the universality of dyslexia across different world languages.

What about genes, brain chemistry, and brain function?

Several genetic variants are associated with dyslexia, and their impact on the brain has been investigated in people and mice. Using animals that have been bred to have genes associated with dyslexia, researchers are investigating how these genes might affect development of and communication among brain regions (Che, et. al., 2014; Galaburda, et al., 2006). These investigations dove-tail with studies in humans. Differences in brain anatomy (Darki, et al., 2012; Meda et al., 2008) and brain function (Cope et al., 2012; Pinel et al., 2012) have been observed in people who carry dyslexia-associated genes, even those people who have good reading skills. In addition to these investigations at the anatomical, physiological, and molecular levels, researchers are trying to pinpoint the chemical connection to dyslexia. For example, brain metabolites that play a role in allowing neurons to communicate can be visualized using another MRI-based technique called spectroscopy. Several metabolites (for example, choline) are thought to be different in people with dyslexia (Pugh et al., 2014). Researchers continue to explore the connections between these findings and are hopeful that what they learn will help to determine the causes of dyslexia. This is a difficult aspect of research because differences in the brains of people with dyslexia are not necessarily the cause of their reading difficulties (for example, it could also be a consequence of reading less).

Changes in Reading, Changes in the Brain

Brain imaging research has revealed anatomical and functional changes in typically developing readers as they learn to read (e.g. Turkeltaub et al., 2003), and in children and adults with dyslexia following effective reading instruction (Krafnick, et al., 2011; Eden et al., 2004). Such studies also shed light onto the brain-based differences of those children with dyslexia who benefit from reading instruction compared to those who fail to make gains (Davis et al., 2011; Odegard, et al., 2008). Neuroimaging data have also been used to predict long-term reading success for children with and without dyslexia (Hoeft et al., 2011).

Cause versus Consequence

An important aspect of research on the brain and reading is to determine whether the findings are the cause or the consequence of dyslexia. Some of the brain regions known to be involved in dyslexia are also altered by learning to read, as demonstrated by comparisons of adults who were illiterate but then learned to read (Carreiras et al., 2009). Longitudinal studies in typical readers reveal anatomical changes with age, some of which are related to development (Giedd et al., 1999) and others to the firming up of language skills (Sowell et al., 2004) in correlation with improvements in phonological skills (Lu et al., 2007). As such, researchers are teasing apart the brain-based differences that can be observed before children begin to learn to read from differences that may occur as a consequence of less reading by people with dyslexia. For example, researchers have found altered brain anatomy (Raschle, et al., 2011) and function (Raschle, et al., 2012) in pre-reading children with a family history of dyslexia. Future studies using longitudinal designs (i.e., long term), will inform the timeline of these changes and clarify cause and consequences of anatomical and functional differences in dyslexia.

Summary

The role of the brain in developmental dyslexia has been studied in the context of brain anatomy, brain chemistry, and brain function-and in combination with interventions to improve reading and information about genetic influences. Together with results of behavioral studies, this information will help researchers to identify the causes of dyslexia, continue to explore early identification of dyslexia, and determine the best avenues for its treatment.

References

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Che, A., Girgenti, M. J., & Loturco, J. (2014). The Dyslexia-Associated Gene Dcdc2 is required for spike-timing precision in mouse neocortex. Biological Psychiatry, in press. doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2013.08.018

Cope, N., Eicher, J. D., Meng, H., Gibson, C. J., Hager, K., Lacadie, C., ... Gruen, J. R. (2012). Variants in the DYX2 locus are associated with altered brain activation in reading-related brain regions in subjects with reading disability. NeuroImage, 63(1), 148-156. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.06.037

Darki, F., Peyrard-Janvid, M., Matsson, H., Kere, J., & Klingberg, T. (2012). Three Dyslexia Susceptibility Genes, DYX1C1, DCDC2, and KIAA0319, affect temporo-parietal white matter structure. Biological Psychiatry, 72(8), 671-676. doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2012.05.008

Dehaene, S., & Cohen, L. (2007). Cultural recycling of cortical maps. Neuron, 56(2), 384-398. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2007.10.004

Eden, G. F., Jones, K. M., Cappell, K., Gareau, L., Wood, F. B., Zeffiro, T. A., ... Flowers, D. L. (2004). Neural changes following remediation in adult developmental dyslexia. Neuron, 44(3), 411-422.

Eden, G. F., VanMeter, J. W., Rumsey, J. M., Maisog, J. M., Woods, R. P., & Zeffiro, T. A. (1996). Abnormal processing of visual motion in dyslexia revealed by functional brain imaging. Nature, 382(6586), 66-69. doi:10.1038/382066a0

Flowers, D. L., Wood, F. B., & Naylor, C. E. (1991). Regional cerebral blood flow correlates of language processes in reading disability. Archives of Neurology, 48(6), 637-643.

Galaburda, A. M., & Kemper, T. L. (1979). Cytoarchitectonic abnormalities in developmental dyslexia: a case study. Annals of Neurology, 6(2), 94-100. doi:10.1002/ana.410060203

Galaburda, A. M., Sherman, G. F., Rosen, G. D., Aboitiz, F., & Geschwind, N. (1985). Developmental dyslexia: four consecutive patients with cortical anomalies. Annals of Neurology, 18(2), 222-233. doi:10.1002/ana.410180210

Galaburda, A. M., LoTurco, J., Ramus, F., Fitch, R. H., & Rosen, G. D. (2006). From genes to behavior in developmental dyslexia. Nature Neuroscience, 9(10), 1213-1217. doi:10.1038/nn1772

Giedd, J. N., Blumenthal, J., Jeffries, N. O., Castellanos, F. X., Liu, H., Zijdenbos, A., ... Rapoport, J. L. (1999). Brain development during childhood and adolescence: A longitudinal MRI study. Nature Neuroscience, 2(10), 861-863. doi:10.1038/13158

Gross-Glenn, K., Duara, R., Barker, W. W., Loewenstein, D., Chang, J. Y., Yoshii, F., ... Sevush, S. (1991). Positron emission tomographic studies during serial word-reading by normal and dyslexic adults. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 13(4), 531-544. doi:10.1080/01688639108401069

Hoeft, F., McCandliss, B. D., Black, J. M., Gantman, A., Zakerani, N., Hulme, C., ... Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2011). Neural systems predicting long-term outcome in dyslexia. PNAS, 108(1), 361-6. doi:10.1073/pnas.1008950108

Krafnick, A. J., Flowers, D. L., Napoliello, E. M., & Eden, G. F. (2011). Gray matter volume changes following reading intervention in dyslexic children. NeuroImage, 57(3), 733-741. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.10.062

Lu, L. H., Leonard, C. M., Thompson, P. M., Kan, E., Jolley, J., Welcome, S. E., ... Sowell, E. R. (2007). Normal developmental changes in inferior frontal gray matter are associated with improvement in phonological processing: a longitudinal MRI analysis. Cerebral Cortex, 17(5), 1092-9. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl019

Meda, S. A., Gelernter, J., Gruen, J. R., Calhoun, V. D., Meng, H., Cope, N. A., & Pearlson, G. D. (2008). Polymorphism of DCDC2 reveals differences in cortical morphology of healthy individuals-A preliminary voxel based morphometry study. Brain Imaging and Behavior, 2(1), 21-26. doi:10.1007/s11682-007-9012-1

Pinel, P., Fauchereau, F., Moreno, A., Barbot, A., Lathrop, M., Zelenika, D., ... Dehaene, S. (2012). Genetic variants of FOXP2 and KIAA0319/TTRAP/THEM2 locus are associated with altered brain activation in distinct language-related regions. The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 32(3), 817-825. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5996-10.2012

Price, C. J. (2012). A review and synthesis of the first 20years of PET and fMRI studies of heard speech, spoken language and reading. Neuroimage, 62(2), 816-847.

Pugh, K. R., Frost, S. J., Rothman, D. L., Hoeft, F., Tufo, S. N. D., Mason, G. F., ... Fulbright, R. K. (2014). Glutamate and choline levels predict individual differences in reading ability in emergent readers. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34(11), 4082-4089. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3907-13.2014

Raschle, N. M., Chang, M., & Gaab, N. (2011). Structural brain alterations associated with dyslexia predate reading onset. Neuroimage, 57(3), 742-749.

Raschle, N. M., Zuk, J., & Gaab, N. (2012). Functional characteristics of developmental dyslexia in left-hemispheric posterior brain regions predate reading onset. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(6), 2156-2161. doi:10.1073/pnas.1107721109

Richlan, F., Kronbichler, M., & Wimmer, H. (2011). Meta-analyzing brain dysfunctions in dyslexic children and adults. Neuroimage, 56(3), 1735-1742. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.02.040
p style="text-indent: -0.5in; margin-left: 0.5in;">Richlan, F., Kronbichler, M., & Wimmer, H. (2013). Structural abnormalities in the dyslexic brain: A meta-analysis of voxel-based morphometry studies. Human Brain Mapping, 34(11), 3055-3065. doi:10.1002/hbm.22127

Rumsey, J. M., Andreason, P., Zametkin, A. J., Aquino, T., King, A. C., Hamburger, S. D., ... Cohen, R. M. (1992). Failure to activate the left temporoparietal cortex in dyslexia. An oxygen 15 positron emission tomographic study. Archives of Neurology, 49, 527-534.

Sowell, E. R., Thompson, P. M., Leonard, C. M., Welcome, S. E., Kan, E., & Toga, A. W. (2004). Longitudinal mapping of cortical thickness and brain growth in normal children. The Journal of Neuroscience, 24(38), 8223-8231. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1798-04.2004

Turkeltaub, P. E., Gareau, L., Flowers, D. L., Zeffiro, T. A., & Eden, G. F. (2003). Development of neural mechanisms for reading. Nature Neuroscience, 6(7), 767-773. doi:10.1038/nn1065
The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) thanks Guinevere F. Eden, Ph.D., for her assistance in the preparation of this fact sheet. © Copyright The International Dyslexia Association (IDA). For copyright information, please click here.

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Researchers are continually conducting studies to learn more about the causes of dyslexia, early identification of dyslexia, and the most effective treatments for dyslexia. Developmental dyslexia is associated with difficulty in processing the orthography (the written form) and phonology (the sound structure) of language.

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American Psychological Association reports on common misunderstandings about people with dyslexia.

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Persistent misunderstandings about reading struggles have impeded progress in diagnosis and treatment

Cite This Article

Sohn, E. (2024, September 1). Untangling dyslexia myths and misconceptions. Monitor on Psychology, 55(6). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/09/dyslexia-myths

Key points

There is no link between dyslexia and IQ.

Promising research showing the differences in dyslexic brains may lead to more objective testing and treatments.

With early and effective interventions-and absent any other disability-all children can learn to read.

When Tim Odegard was a third grader struggling to learn to read, his parents were told that his IQ score made him "too stupid" to have dyslexia, a learning disability that interferes with the ability to decipher written language. At the time, in the early 1980s, IQ scores for children who were struggling to read needed to be above a certain level for experts to diagnose dyslexia. Other struggling readers often heard instead that they weren't reading because they were lazy or stupid. Although plenty of scientific evidence has since debunked the idea that intelligence has anything to do with dyslexia, it remains one of many misconceptions about the disorder that have impeded progress in teaching children to read.

Today, studies suggest that as many as 20% of people in the United States have dyslexia, which accounts for up to 90% of learning disabilities ( Shaywitz, S. E., et al.,Current Opinion in Psychiatry, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2021). Through studies of brains, genetics, and educational strategies, scientists are better understanding causes of reading troubles. But disagreement, debate, and misunderstandings rage on about many details, including how to define dyslexia, how to diagnose it, and how best to teach reading to struggling readers. These disagreements often incorporate politics as well as science.

Nevertheless, consensus is building that dyslexia impacts mental health, interventions can boost self-esteem, and there are clear ways of improving reading abilities for most people ( Georgiou, G. K., et al., Annals of Dyslexia, Vol. 74, No. 1, 2024).

"We've come a long way in trying to raise awareness and dispel the negative stereotype of dyslexia," said Odegard, who is now a developmental cognitive psychologist and professor of psychology at Middle Tennessee State University and editor-in-chief of the journal Annals of Dyslexia. He learned the results of his third-grade IQ test after earning his PhD. "Although, that negative stereotype is still out there."

Cascading consequences

In the context of tens of thousands of years of human history, reading and writing are extremely new technologies-emerging just a few thousand years ago and becoming available to much of society far more recently than that. Our brains did not evolve to handle the task of hearing individual speech sounds, and only a small percentage of children, maybe 5%, learn to read with very little support, said Daniel Willingham, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. Those students tend to have strong oral language skills and a good ability to distinguishing between sounds, such as the difference between "big" and "pig."

How best to teach children to read has fueled decades of debate, often called the "reading wars." That debate is particularly salient for children with dyslexia, which is in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fifth Edition) and generally considered to be a deficit in the ability to accurately and fluently decode, or turn printed words into speech. This disconnect essentially represents a bottleneck in the process of bridging the visual system and the language system, according to Kenneth Pugh, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Yale Child Study Center. "I always say if each word takes your entire soul to pull off the page," he said, "then by the time you get to the end of the sentence, you kind of forgot the beginning."

Studies indicate that dyslexia can have significant mental health consequences. Social anxiety, for one, was more prevalent in fifth-grade students who had literacy struggles in the second and third grades, compared with peers who didn't have the same challenges early on, found a 2023 study of Greek children published in a special issue of the Annals of Dyslexia on dyslexia and mental health ( Kargiotidis, A., & Manolitsis, G., Annals of Dyslexia, Vol. 74, No. 1, 2024). Children with dyslexia who also had inattention or hyperactivity, which commonly co-occur, were particularly vulnerable to social anxiety, found another study in the same issue (Annals of Dyslexia, Vol. 74, No. 1, 2024). Dyslexia has also been linked to depression and low self-esteem.

The disorder and its reverberations can affect the trajectory of a person's life dramatically. Children with learning disabilities tend to lag behind in academic achievement, and social-emotional struggles can persist into adulthood ( Schwartz, A. E., et al., Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 40, No. 2, 2021; Haft, S. L., et al., Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol. 56, No. 3, 2023). Dyslexia is overrepresented in prisons, according to a report by the criminal justice research firm JFA Associates, and some 70% of inmates read at or below a fourth-grade level.

Stereotypes and stigma contribute to such negative outcomes, found a 2023 review of 16 studies that considered the psychological and academic outcomes for students with learning disabilities, including dyslexia. Stigma arises from the label that characterizes a person as "different," the researchers wrote, which can play out in a variety of ways. Students might be physically separated from their peers during the school day. Teachers and parents might develop lower expectations of them, the researchers posited. And children might experience bullying from classmates while internalizing the belief that something is wrong with them. Overall, the review found that stigma contributes to low self-esteem in children with learning disabilities ( Haft, S. L., et al., Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol. 56, No. 3, 2023).

Still, dyslexia often goes unidentified. In a sample of close to 10,000 fourth graders in Italy, nearly 2 out of 3 students with the disorder had not been diagnosed ( Barbiero, C., et al., PLOS ONE, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2019). Despite legislation in most U.S. states that governs screening, intervention, and other dyslexia-related services, non-White students and children who go to schools with predominantly non-White populations are also less likely than others to get diagnosed via dyslexia screening programs, Odegard and colleagues found in an analysis of data from 7,947 second-grade students in 126 schools in Arkansas (Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol. 53, No. 5, 2020). Students attending majority-White schools, on the other hand, had access to more reading supports than other schools, found research in Boston, according to an article in the Hechinger Report, an education publication.

Those disparities reflect and likely exacerbate gaps in reading ability, studies suggest. According to 2022 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), just 33% of fourth-grade students and 31% of eighth-grade students are at or above proficiency levels in reading. Proficiency levels were 38% for White eighth graders compared with 16% for their Black classmates. Some of those children are likely to have dyslexia and other learning disorders and would benefit from extra intervention.

The interaction of reading troubles and self-esteem troubles can have cascading consequences beginning in elementary school, when struggles with reading begin to become highly visible, said Mark Seidenberg, PhD, a cognitive neuroscientist and professor of psychology who recently retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Seidenberg has studied language, reading, and dyslexia for more than 40 years and has published dozens of peer-reviewed papers on the topic. Adults with dyslexia can learn to read, but issues with confidence can begin in childhood. "By the time they are in fourth to sixth grade, if they're still failing, their motivation to continue drops off and they disengage," Seidenberg said. "The consequences of not being able to read are huge."
[Related: Treating patients with dyslexia]

Understanding dyslexia

Diagnosing dyslexia early on is important because it can make the difference in whether or not a student qualifies for school-based educational services to improve reading, Pugh said. But diagnosis can be challenging because there is no definitive test that can determine whether someone does or does not have dyslexia. Like other forms of neurodiversity, the disorder occurs on a spectrum, and diagnoses usually involve screening assessments with cut-off points and a subjective evaluation by assessors who vary in their reliance on different models of the disorder.

Meanwhile, false stereotypes still get in the way of accurate diagnoses. The idea that people with dyslexia see letters backward, for example, is a myth that has persisted and proliferated, according to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. What Odegard experienced as a child-the belief that there must be a significant difference between a child's cognitive abilities and reading abilities in order to diagnose dyslexia-has also persisted even though the standard, known as the discrepancy model, has been debunked, Odegard said.

In the search for more objective measures, some researchers are looking to the brain, where studies using MRI and EEG are showing patterns that distinguish the brain of a person with dyslexia from the brain of a person without dyslexia. Scientists have long known that multiple brain areas are involved in reading. These regions, which regulate processes like speaking and object recognition, are predominantly in the left side of the brain, in areas such as the parietotemporal and occipitotemporal regions. In people with dyslexia, studies have indicated a smaller amount of gray matter and less brain activity in these regions. Dyslexic brains also show different patterns of activation in a variety of regions while reading compared with non-dyslexic brains ( Richlan, F., Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 11, No. 155, 2020).

These patterns appear to be consistent across languages and writing systems, suggesting some universal signatures in the way the brain struggles to learn to read, Pugh said. (Although brain-imaging studies can't yet be used for diagnosis, his group and others are looking into brain-stimulating techniques that might give specific neurons a kick, especially in children with dyslexia who struggle the most.) "If you're typically developing, you develop a certain left hemisphere connection, particularly between the left occiptotemporal cortex and Wernicke's and Broca's [language areas]. They have to sort of strengthen each other and connect," he said. "In the absence of treatment, dyslexia presents very often with a failure to see that."

Genetics also plays a role in determining who develops dyslexia. Twin and family studies indicate that genes explain 40% to 60% of the risk for developing dyslexia ( Gialluisi, A., et al., Molecular Psychiatry, Vol. 26, No. 7, 2021). Multiple genes are involved, and studies are ongoing to understand the mechanisms and the ways that home and school environments influence the effect these genes have on the brain.

Richard Wagner's group at Florida State University has proposed viewing dyslexia as a spectrum of severity and acknowledging that dyslexia has many causes that can interact with each other (Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol. 53, No. 5, 2020). "As opposed to thinking that there's a dyslexia test or that there's a single indicator, it's a constellation of risk factors," Odegard said, "some of them being your language skills, others being aspects around you."

Overcoming reading struggles

Identifying who has dyslexia is only half the battle. Next comes the task of teaching these individuals to read. In general, studies indicate that for children with dyslexia, it is particularly important to address specific components of reading, Pugh said, including a focus on phonics, which makes the link between letters and sounds explicit.

In addition, the most successful instructional reading interventions include work on spelling, vocabulary, and connected-text reading (or reading multiple sentences that are related to each other), found a 2022 meta-analysis of 53 studies. And dose matters. For students with dyslexia or at risk for dyslexia, the study suggested that every extra hour of intervention helped improve outcomes ( Hall, C., et al., Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 2, 2023). Extra intensive and sustained instruction matters most for the 3% to 5% of children with dyslexia who struggle the most, Odegard added.

Managing stress and addressing mental health might be part of the solution, too, experts said, although research is still new and studies are small. Because anxiety is prevalent in children with learning disabilities and can interfere with learning, some experts advocate for strategies such as exercise, meditation, and mindfulness ( Tarrasch, R., et al., Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 578, 2016). Mentoring programs that connect children with similar struggles can also reduce depression and improve self-esteem, Stephanie Haft, a clinical psychology doctoral intern at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues found in an evaluation of a program that paired elementary and middle school students who have learning disabilities and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder with mentors in high school or college who have the same conditions (Child and Adolescent Mental Health, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2019).

Instituting these approaches will require overcoming ingrained educational ideas, Seidenberg said. Instead of an explicit focus on phonics and other useful strategies, for instance, many schools continue to use curriculum known as "balanced literacy," which is based on outdated ideas that children will learn to read if you hand them books and teach them to guess at what the words are based on letter and picture clues. It can be hard to persuade teachers to change when it seems that what they have been doing has worked for most students.

Researchers are also working to overcome a long history of skepticism about dyslexia. For decades, Seidenberg said, some influential educators argued that the disorder was simply an excuse made by ineffective teachers and that every child could learn to read if they were just taught correctly. As a result, dyslexia became a "dirty word" in education. Another persistent and harmful myth, he said, is the idea that dyslexia is an advantage or "desirable difficulty" that may produce extraordinary achievement ( Odegard, T. N., & Dye, M., Annals of Dyslexia, 2024). "We need neuro-realities," Odegard said, that don't sugarcoat reality and instead "acknowledge what we really need as a community to help our children." Knowing they have dyslexia can help children understand why they are having more trouble than their peers in school, and that can be heartening, Willingham added.

Given the obstacles to change, some advocates are pushing for policies that legislate evidence-based reading interventions. "You have generations of educators who've been taught that dyslexia was a thing that was invented by people to excuse the failures of the educational system," Seidenberg said. "As opposed to, it's a condition that actually affects people."

Changing perceptions

As evidence accumulates about the most effective interventions, researchers are also gathering evidence about what makes some children resilient, even when they are at risk of dyslexia-with the hopes of boosting the same kind of resilience in others. Those factors can include social and emotional strengths and high-quality instruction early in life, wrote University of California, Los Angeles literacy researcher Maryann Wolf and colleagues in a 2023 review of the history and future of dyslexia (Annals of Dyslexia, 2024).

On the cognitive side, Haft and a colleague wrote in a 2016 article for the International Dyslexia Association, it is important to nurture oral language skills, vocabulary knowledge, and goal-setting strategies. From a social-emotional perspective, it helps to give children with dyslexia a sense of control and self-worth (see Treating patients with dyslexia).

Debate continues about whether dyslexia is associated with different ways of thinking or certain kinds of strengths. Based on anecdotal observations, people have long suggested that dyslexia is overrepresented among entrepreneurs and in creative fields. And a variety of pop culture books, including The Dyslexic Advantage, argue that understanding these differences can help people find workarounds, compensatory techniques, and useful technologies to succeed at school and in the workplace. "If you know who you are, you know how your mind works, you'll know the best way to learn," said coauthor Brock Eide in a lecture to The Lab School in Washington, D.C. "The key to success is building on your strengths."

However, many of those theories remain speculative and based on correlations, Odegard said, and run the risk of causing harm through stereotyping. "The kids I work with tell me that these myths make them feel like impostors for not having one of these abilities or ways of thinking differently," he said. For now, there are not enough data to say whether trends are real and biological, or if observations are based on "the fact that so many dyslexic kids have to fight like hell for everything, making some of them extra highly motivated," Pugh said. "There are good reasons to explore this question further."

Most studies on hypothetical strengths in dyslexia fail to acknowledge the heterogeneity of people with the learning disorder, Wolf added. "There needs to be far more and far better research on the putative strengths of individuals with dyslexia," she said. In the meantime, students with dyslexia need to know that they are as talented and intelligent as their peers, wrote Wolf and colleagues in their 2024 paper arguing for a new definition of the disorder (Annals of Dyslexia, 2024). As other studies have shown, there is no link between dyslexia and IQ, they pointed out ( Tanaka, H., et al., Psychological Science, Vol. 22, No. 11, 2011). As a difference, dyslexia becomes a disability only in the context of disabling environments.

Despite the challenges that dyslexia presents for students, structured reading programs that emphasize resilience, persistence, and self-esteem can set children up for success, Wolf and colleagues concluded. "The history of rigorous reading intervention studies in the last twenty years underscores how well we can remediate children at risk for dyslexia, regardless of their race, socioeconomic background, or IQ," they wrote. With early and effective interventions, they added, children can learn to read.

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Untangling dyslexia myths and misconceptions

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Persistent misunderstandings about reading struggles have impeded progress in diagnosis and treatment.

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People with dyslexia have ‘enhanced abilities’, according to a new study

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People with dyslexia have ‘enhanced abilities’, according to a new study

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The dyslexic brain is wired for creativity, say researchers at the University of Cambridge, who believe dyslexia should no longer be considered a ‘disorder’.

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Is There a Link Between Creativity and Dyslexia? - Lexercise

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Dyslexia affects the way the brain processes and there are many benefits including creativity that come from being dyslexic. Read more here.

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Is there a link between creativity and dyslexia?

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Is there a link between creativity and dyslexia?

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Cancer, A., Manzoli, S., & Antonietti, A. (2016). The alleged link between creativity and dyslexia: Identifying the specific process in which dyslexic students excel. Cogent Psychology, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311908.2016.1190309

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As a child, Roberto Olivardia didn't enjoy reading. Processing the words on a page fatigued him. But Olivardia - now a psychologist at McLean Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School - never considered that he might have dyslexia. He remembers watching an episode of the ABC Afterschool Specials series about a boy with dyslexia who wrote words backwards. Since Olivardia's writing looked normal, he thought "that's not me.

Decades later, Olivardia witnessed his six-year-old son experiencing a similar fatigue. Only the six-year-old's was worse. "His vocabulary was off the charts, it was so extensive," Olivardia recalls, "but with reading, there was a real difference between him and other kids." Only after his son's diagnosis of dyslexia did Olivardia become aware of the condition's complexities: how misunderstood it is among parents, teachers, and doctors; how it manifests in myriad ways; and how a diagnosis can change everything.

Yet getting that diagnosis is not always easy because physicians and scientists are still putting together the many puzzle pieces of dyslexia, a language-based learning disability that affects an estimated 7 to 10 percent of the population. The condition is marked by a person's difficulty to accurately and fluently read words and to accurately decode and spell words.

Although the causes for dyslexia are complex, a main factor is a person's difficulty with phonological and phonemic awareness; that is, their ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of words, which sets the stage for decoding, blending, and, ultimately, reading words. Imagine, for example, being presented a word from a language other than your native language, written using symbols or an alphabet associated with that language. It may be possible to get a sense of the sounds in the word - but remembering all of them and blending them together could be hard. Each letter would need to be deciphered, and their sounds stitched together to form a word. It's a process that can take time.

Doctors in Europe began talking about dyslexia in the nineteenth century - around the time compulsory schooling became more common. They described a curious paradox: cases of individuals who, despite being otherwise healthy, had trouble reading. In 1896 in the British Medical Journal, physician William Pringle Morgan wrote about a 14-year-old patient who he described as a bright and intelligent boy whose "great difficulty has always been ... [an] inability to learn to read."

In the ensuing decades, various hypotheses for the causes came and went. It wasn't laziness. It wasn't a vision problem. It wasn't the result of an infection. Some scientists began to suspect structural differences in the brain.

Searching for dyslexia clues in the brain is not simple. In part, that's because there isn't a single region of the brain devoted to reading. In the course of human history, reading is a relatively recent innovation. Unlike with spoken language, humans haven't evolved a natural capacity for learning to read through exposure. Instead, learning to read requires that different areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes - including vision and sound perception - be retrained to work together to recognize and interpret written words. If scientists wanted to pinpoint the basis of dyslexia, they would need to explore the many brain regions involved in reading, as well as the neural pathways connecting them.

How does the brain learn to read? This short video explains.

Another hurdle? "It's not really a disease," says Albert Galaburda , the Emily Fisher Landau Professor of Neurology, Emeritus, at HMS. When Galaburda began searching for brain evidence of dyslexia back in the 1970s, advanced imaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) were not yet available; instead, researchers studied postmortem brains. And since people didn't typically die of dyslexia, it was rare to find a donated brain linked to a recorded case of the condition.

In 1979, Galaburda found an exception: a donated brain from a young man who had fallen through an elevator shaft to his death because his dyslexia prevented him from reading a cautionary sign. In one of the first studies exploring anatomical brain differences in people with dyslexia, published in Annals of Neurology in 1979, Galaburda and a colleague highlighted some interesting patterns that he would later also find in brains of other dyslexic people, including unusual symmetry between the two hemispheres and anomalies in the development of the cortex. Along with his mentor, Norman Geschwind, MD '51, Galaburda's work raised myriad associations for researchers to test, such as links between dyslexia and autoimmune disorders or levels of sex hormones.

"Geschwind and Galaburda were among the first ones thinking about a multifactorial model - looking at all the different factors that sort of work together to cause atypical reading development," says Nadine Gaab, an associate professor of pediatrics at HMS and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Clues found in the developing brain

By the time Gaab began her own research into dyslexia in 2007, new neuroimaging techniques were available for researchers to examine the brains of children living with dyslexia or those who had a familial risk for the condition - that is, a biological parent or sibling with dyslexia. At that point, "we knew a lot about how the brain of a person with dyslexia differed in activation patterns and different tasks," Galaburda says. But an important question remained: Did dyslexia cause these differences, or did these differences cause dyslexia?

Gaab focused on answering this question. An MIT research group she was a part of focused its study on one white matter tract called the arcuate fasciculus, or the "the arc," which connects key brain areas involved in reading: those related to vision and sound processing at the back of the brain and the inferior frontal gyrus, an area responsible for comprehension and meaning. In a subsequent longitudinal study in which the brains of kindergartners were scanned, Gaab and colleagues demonstrated that children who had lower phonological processing skills, a risk factor for dyslexia, also had smaller arcs.

Nadine Gaab

After identifying that link, Gaab and colleagues set out to learn when these differences emerge. They compared brain scans from children with a familial risk for dyslexia with those from children without the familial risk and found that children at risk for the condition showed differences in the arc even before beginning formal schooling. Moreover, the rate of the structure's development was slower among those who later developed poor reading skills regardless of familial risk. To the researchers, this suggested that some children began kindergarten with brains that were less well equipped for learning to read.

To explore how early these differences emerged, the researchers examined the brains of participants who had thus far been largely neglected in dyslexia studies: babies. Their initial study, published in Cerebral Cortex in 2017, found that infants of parents who had struggled with reading showed alterations the arc compared to infants of parents who hadn't struggled to read. In subsequent studies, they observed a link between these alterations and phonological processing and oral language skills in kindergarten. They also found that the microstructure of the arc can be shaped by lifestyle factors, such as how early and often a child is read to.

We now know that some kids who step into kindergarten on their first day, with their little backpacks, have a heightened risk for struggling with learning to read.

While the arc is only one of several brain areas exhibiting differences in people with dyslexia, Gaab's findings have provided an impetus for action. In addition to linking risk factors for dyslexia to specific parts of the brain, her work shows that some of these risks can be inherited. And the findings indicate that while genetics matter, environment can matter, too. Perhaps more important, they suggest that risk factors for dyslexia exist early - very early. "We now know that some kids who step into kindergarten on their first day, with their little backpacks, have a heightened risk for struggling with learning to read," Gaab says. "That's a really important distinction in terms of policy and how early we should find these kids and intervene."

The value of early intervention

Despite so many children already at risk before starting school, U.S. school systems tend to identify children with dyslexia only after it's clear that something is wrong - at around nine or ten years old. Gaab, who describes herself as a "translational neuroscientist," has become a tireless proponent of early intervention. She advocated for a new Massachusetts law that was signed by the governor in 2018, requiring screening for dyslexia for children in kindergarten. And she's been developing a tablet-based tool that can be used to screen children for reading problems as early as age four. This latter tool is especially useful because fMRI data, while good for exploring overall patterns of brain differences between groups, is impractical in educational contexts and does not have the sensitivity and specificity necessary to identify at-risk children.

Gaab hopes that pediatricians - who often screen for autism and ADHD - will adopt dyslexia risk screening, too. "We embrace preventive medicine; we get mammograms and checkups to identify risk factors and try to address them so that we don't get sick," she says. "That's the same idea with dyslexia, to find at-risk kids early and intervene early, so that they never develop problems with reading. We call it preventive education."

Dyslexia itself is not hazardous to anyone's health. It really is the fact that they're not being identified, they're not being diagnosed, and they're not getting the services that they need.

Proper early identification is key, adds Gaab, because studies indicate that 50 to 90 percent of at-risk readers can reach average levels of performance with targeted instruction, and that interventions are more effective in kindergarten and first grade than later on.

According to Olivardia, children who are never identified, or who live in communities without access to these interventions, might get lumped into generic remedial reading classes. But if their instruction isn't tailored to dyslexia, "it's as if you don't understand the language someone is speaking, so they just speak louder," he says. "You're like, that doesn't help me at all."

Early intervention does more than help get reading levels on track. Children with dyslexia are more likely to experience depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. But that's not due to differences in their brains; it's because in our society, literacy is key to academic and workplace success. "Dyslexia itself is not hazardous to anyone's health," says Olivardia, whose private psychotherapy practice specializes in treating children with learning disabilities. "It really is the fact that they're not being identified, they're not being diagnosed, and they're not getting the services that they need."

Education provides perspective

Olivardia understands the importance of reframing dyslexia for his patients. He talks to them about the many successful people who are thought to have had dyslexia - from Einstein to Picasso to British business magnate Richard Branson - and stresses his own observations that people with dyslexia exhibit above-average creativity and entrepreneurial skills. Research backs this up: A 2009 study in found a prevalence of dyslexia three times higher among entrepreneurs than people in the general population, while a higher prevalence of dyslexia has also been identified among students who pursue art or engineering. Other research points to a superior ability to connect unusual combinations of ideas among people with dyslexia.

Olivardia also draws from his experience parenting a child with dyslexia. Following his son's diagnosis, they practiced role-playing conversations with teachers and peers about the learning disability. One day, a few weeks after diagnosis, Olivardia's son was given lyrics to read in music class, but his dyslexia was so severe at that point that he couldn't read the words at all.

Olivardia's son asked a classmate to sit and sing along with him. The girl, confused, asked him why he couldn't read. Instead of shrinking away, he calmly explained that his brain was just different - and pointed out that Tom Cruise has the same thing. "She was like, oh, OK, and that was it," Olivardia says. "And he sat next to her. And when I picked him up, he said, 'Dad, it was a great day.'"

"There's a lot of hope in a label and a name," Olivardia adds. "It gives parents, teachers, and doctors the opportunity to emphasize that these kids' brains are wired differently - but that different does not mean they are defective."

Molly McDonough is the associate editor of Harvard Medicine
Images: John Soares (Olivardia); courtesy of Anna Olivella and the Harvard Brain Science Initiative (Gaab)

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Research on dyslexia is identifying the many factors - neural to societal - that are linked to the condition

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Neuromyths about Special Educational Needs: What should teachers know : My College

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Jo Van Herwegen, Associate Professor, Psychology and Human Development, Faculty of Education and Society, UCL, UK Michael Thomas, Director, Centre for Educational Neuroscience, Birkbeck, University of London, UK Chloe Marshall, Professor, Psychology and Human Development, Faculty of Education and Society, UCL, UK Rebecca Gordon, Associate Professor, Psychology and Human Development, Faculty of Education and Society, […]

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Video- Dyslexia: a differently wired brain

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Video- Dyslexia: a differently wired brain

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You are not alone in your journey with dyslexia.

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Video: What is dyslexia?~Kelli Sandman-Hurley 

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Video: What is dyslexia?~Kelli Sandman-Hurley 

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What is dyslexia? - Kelli Sandman-Hurley

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Tech Innovations That Help students with dyslexia the classroom

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As an educator, you can make the learning process more accessible to children with learning disabilities by using accommodating technologies. These are some of the tools you can use.

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Is your child with dyslexia sleeping poorly?

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Is your child with dyslexia sleeping poorly?

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Check out this resource for some tips to help them get the quality sleep their brain and body needs.

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Quality sleep is crucial for dyslexic children because they work much harder than other kids to achieve the same results. Our children may even have to work harder while they sleep because they find processing and storing information more difficult.[i]

According to HealthPost, if a child loses 1 hour of sleep a night, it is the equivalent to the loss of 2 years of cognitive maturity the next day. A fifteen-year-old will therefore function at the level of a 13-year-old following a late night.

In my post about perfectionism, I mentioned we wanted our son, Harry, to join the basketball team. All I can say is, be careful what you wish for! Harry now has four training sessions per week and gets up at 5.50 AM on two days to attend the 6.50 practices. It wouldn't be so bad if he went to bed early, but we hound him to go to bed from 10 PM until he finally crashes at 11 PM. This is way too late, as he needs 8.5-10 hours of sleep to function at his best.

Recommended hours of sleep for a child

Age Hours of Sleep

0-1 yr 14-18 hrs

1-3 yrs 12-14 hrs

3-5 yrs 11-13 hrs

5-12 yrs 10- 12 hrs

12-18 yrs 8.5-10 hrs

ADD/ADHD and Sleep

According to the International Dyslexia Association, around 30% of children with dyslexia also have ADD. ADD creates problems with getting to sleep. The following is taken from www.additudemag.com/sleep-aids-parents-children-adhd/. This website is a goldmine of information and offers a free download on sleep solutions for kids with ADHD.

"Research of children and adults with ADHD (when compared to controls) shows that the majority of these individuals has a late sleep onset that is associated with a late onset of the sleep hormone melatonin ( van der Heijden et al, 2005; van Veen et al, 2010).

Melatonin is produced by the pineal gland in the brain when it is getting dark in the evening, and we wake up by light in the morning. The onset of the melatonin production helps to fall asleep.

For most adults, the onset of melatonin is around 9.30 pm; in ADHD children compared to controls, this occurs at least 45 minutes later, and in adults with ADHD, even 90 minutes later (van der Heijden ea, 2005; van Veen ea 2010). After melatonin onset, it normally takes 2 hours to fall asleep, but in adults with ADHD, it takes at least 3 hours ( Bijlenga et al, 2013)."

Teenage Years and Sleep

Harry has ADD, but he is also a teenager. What has been a teen got to do with sleep? I hear you ask. Paul Kelley, an Honorary Associate in Sleep, Circadian and Memory Neuroscience at the Open University, has written an excellent post on theconversation.com as to why it is difficult for teens to be early risers. He says:

"In 2004, researchers at the University of Munich proved that teenagers actually have a different sense of time. Their study showed that the 24-hour cycle which determines when you wake and sleep gets later during your teens, reaching its latest point by the age of 20.

After 20, the body's waking and sleeping times gradually get earlier again, until at 55 you naturally wake about the same time as you did when you were 10. The link between the movements of this biological clock and the process of puberty was so strong that the researchers suggested this "peak lateness" at the end of the teenage years could be the biological marker for the end of puberty."

What happens when we sleep?

Queensland Health has a fascinating article about 7 amazing things that happen to your body while you sleep, which is well worth a read.

In Medical News Today, I also found an interesting article that says waves of cerebrospinal fluid wash the brain to remove metabolic ̒trash' when we sleep.

Having read these two articles, I'm convinced Harry needs more than seven hours. Besides that, his late nights and early mornings are affecting everyone in our household.

Here are the 5 things I'm going to try to get quality sleep for my dyslexic child

Show the connection between performance and adequate sleep.

I'd like to think if we could make Harry understand the benefits of sleep for himself it would make a difference. I know friends have changed their child's bedtimes with this approach, but I'm not sure it will work for our dyslexia/ADD boy. Anyway, it is worth a try and this is what we'll tell him.

A family friend is a personal trainer. He insists his clients prioritise sleep as he says they can't build muscle without adequate rest.

Tom Brady, the 43-year-old NFL player, claims he is faster than he's ever been due to his lifestyle. He eats well and goes to bed at 8.30 PM.

Take devices and phones away half an hour before bedtime.

Parents in a 2018 study said that their child's electronic devices were the major cause of sleeplessness.

We have never let Harry charge his phone in his room. Yes, this is a constant battle, and we are apparently "the meanest parents in the world". Harry has poor self-control, and, from charging it in our room, we know his friends regularly send him messages at 2 or 3 in the morning.

Harry, like many children with dyslexia, dislikes school. His 'happy place' is on his mountain bike in the hills. Up till now, he has managed to get by at school doing very little homework, however, this year he is taking important examinations, and the number of assignments has ramped up.

I ensure he has a large snack when he gets home after school and give him an hour of 'down-time.' Then I sit with him to plan his study. When necessary, I act as a reader-writer for him to get the work finished well before bedtime.

Like many teens, Harry wants to look 'cool.' His mountain biking heroes are frequently sponsored by the energy drinks companies Red Bull and Monster. I recently read an article about the effect caffeine has on the teenage body, and I know if his drinks contain caffeine he will struggle to sleep because it can take up to nine hours for caffeine to leave the body.[ii] Milk is Harry's go-to drink and a cup of warm milk before bed encourages sleep.

Harry already takes Daily Essential Nutrient to control his ADD[iii] so I don't want to give him extra magnesium, which can aid sleep. I'm going to look at tart cherry as a sleep aid. According to HealthPost

Montmorency Tart Cherry (Prunus cerasus) is a 'superfruit' that contains naturally occurring phytomelatonin for a quality sleep. Tart Cherries also contain potent anthocyanin antioxidants that support the immune system.

Melatonin may also be an option, but I'd need to get that for him on prescription.

Wish me luck. If you bump into me and I have dark circles under my eyes, you'll know this is still a work in progress. All I can say is Harry better be enjoying his basketball!

Is quality sleep a problem for the dyslexic children in your home?

What have you found helpful?
Tired kids struggle to learn. If you want to know how I taught my son to read and spell in 30 minutes a day, here are my affilate links to All About learning. I hope you find All About Spelling and All About Reading equally helpful. If your child also struggles to learn the multiplication tables, check out this blog post on how using stories will help them remember the facts. This programme is based on the Orton Gillingham approach. Learn more about this h
Speechify is an app that can help dyslexic children as it reads online text. Here is my affiliate link.

[i] Knebel C (2016). Sleep deprived dyslexic. https://blog.dyslexia.com/sleep-deprived-dyslexic/. Accessed 25 February 2021.

[ii]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223808/#:~:text=The%20mean%20half%2Dlife%20of,et%20al.%2C%201989). Accessed 25 February 2021.

[iii] https://www.hardynutritionals.com/studies/category/adhd Accessed 25 February 2021.

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5 things to try to get quality sleep for dyslexic children * Dyslexia Octopus

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Quality sleep is crucial for dyslexic children because they must work harder than other children. These 5 tips may help.