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Dyslexia

Introduction

This paper defines visual dyslexia, giving its possible causes. It also sates the effects to the patient who are in most cases children stressing that it is not a disease but an impairment that cannot be treated.

Visual dyslexia

Visual dyslexia can be defined as a pathological reading difficulty caused by a visual impairment.  It is having difficulty in reading and comprehending text due to visual problems. The patient makes frequent visually based errors more especially in word recognition despite being able to name the component. The patient with these difficulties are said to be visual dyslexics, visuospatial dyslexics or dyseidetic dyslexics. The patient these reading and spelling patterns portray the following visual processing weaknesses. The word dyslexia was derived from the Greek word dys meaning poor or inadequate and lexis meaning works or language (Cardon L. 1994).

Dyslexia is a learning disability characterized by problems in expressive, receptive, oral or written language. Problems come up in reading, spelling, writing, speaking and listening. Dyslexia is not a disease and it has no cure. It describes a different kind of mind that learns differently. It is not the result of low intelligence or the problem of intelligence. Dyslexia is not a visual problem but it is a language problem. Dyslexia results from differences in the structure and function of the brain. The patient lack the ability to organize or position the way something is seen, confuse shapes, order of letters, and are not able to focus on a specific object for a long period of time. For instance, a child can confuse the shape of a triangle for a square or see the word bat and read the letters backward which results in them seeing tab. Other paralexia (mistakes made by person with visual dyslexia) include saccade (word scanning by series of fixations and fast eye movement) ambiguous consonants, phonetic value to silent graphemic consonants, vowel digraphs, consonant clusters, shift stress of words, neologisms (new word), loss of syllable and consonants misplaced. Deep dyslexia is a complex reading disorder caused by brain damage in which the symptom is the occupancy of semantic errors in single word (Cardon L. 1994).

Causes

Photon energies that is specific to hypersensitive individuals induce within the eye’s photopic photoreceptors the conditions that create dyslexic-type visual abnormalities, and that those photon energies can be effectively suppressed before they reach the visual system of susceptible individuals. Dyslexic individuals often experience symptomatic relief when treated with specific colored transparent overlays. Photon energies specific to hypersensitive individuals, induce within the eye’s photopic photoreceptors the conditions that create dyslexic-type visual abnormalities. Photon energies can be suppressed before they reach the visual system of susceptible individuals. Dyslexic patient experience symptomatic relief when treated with specific colored transparent overlays (Michael C. 2004).

Paraletic errors are attributed to a dysfunction of the visual analysis system in the dual route parallel model of reading. Studies that have shown that visual dyslexia runs throughout families and is passed on to many children genetically.  A statistical geneticist found evidence that a gene for dyslexia sits on chromosome number six, which is one of the twenty-three chromosomes (Cardon, 1994).

Dr. Glen Rosen, a Harvard neuroscientist explained that nerve cells within the left hemisphere of the brain appear smaller than in the right hemisphere. This difference in size of nerve cells throw off the timing of the brain and disrupt its crucial word processing skills, Dr. Albert Balaburda, a neurologist from Harvard postulated that the brain of dyslexic people are bombarded with tiny lesions and out-of-place cells which explains that the core of the problem may live in the machinery that controls prenatal development. Neurologist and researcher of dyslexia broke down the disorder into three different subtypes to establish a technique to teach children with different degrees of dyslexia. The first subtype is known as dysphonetic dyslexia. When these children read, they insert or delete letters and syllables. In dyseidetic dyslexia, the patient can not recognize words as a whole and seem to read very slowly. Lastly, mixed dyslexia and children with this subtype experience both dysphonetic and dysedetic dyslexia; furthermore, mixed dyslexia causes these children more academic failure than any other known subtype.

Bakker’s three subtypes were linguistic, perceptual, and mixed dyslexia. Linguistic dyslexia referred to a child s ability to read fast; however many mistakes were present because the child omitted and added letters and syllables. This is similar to Border’s dysphonetic dyslexia. Secondly, perceptual dyslexia exists when a child reads accurately yet slowly. Bakker’s third subtype (mixed dyslexia) is comparable to Boder’s mixed dyslexia since they both are a combination of the first and second subtypes. There are three approaches for treating dyslexic patients and they include the developmental, corrective, and remedial approach. The developmental approach suggests that teachers should instruct in small groups or individually because extra time and attention is necessary for some dyslexic children. The corrective approach also takes place in small or individual groups allowing the child to explore special interests so that the children can rely on their own special abilities in order to overcome difficulties. In the remedial approach, it is considered important to determine the skills that are most difficult and then apply individualized

Effects on a student

The different motor functions involved in normal reading like eye scanning, fixations and saccades performed to integrate fovea images is disrupted as a result of an acquired lesion to the right or left hemisphere of the eye.

Conclusion

Visual dyslexia is often inherited through genes. It can be caused by early ear infections as well. There are three approaches for treating dyslexic patients and they include the developmental, corrective, and remedial approach. 

References:

Boder E. (1973) .Developmenal dyslexia: a diagnostic approach based on three atypical reading-spelling patterns.

Cardon L. (1994). Acquired dyslexia.

Michael C. (2004). Photon Induced Visual Abnormalities (PIVA) and Visual Dyslexia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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