Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty that can cause problems with reading, writing, and spelling. It’s a specific learning difficulty, which means it causes problems with certain abilities used for learning, such as reading and writing. Intelligence is generally not affected. Dyslexia persists after the average learning age of speech and affects three times more boys than girls. The cause of dyslexia is a genetic abnormality on chromosomes 15 and 18.

There are several forms of dyslexia:

• Phonological dyslexia: representing around 60% of cases, characterized by difficulty to associate a sound to specific letters.

• Surface dyslexia (visual dyslexia): affecting 10-30% of cases, characterized by decoding issues that lead to difficulty to remember or recognize whole words by sight.

• Mixed dyslexia: 20-30% of cases, characterized by a combination of phonological dyslexia and surface dyslexia leading to slow reading and difficulties with comprehension.

• Motor dyslexia: Difficulty with acquiring movements which allow to write and leads to slow and hesitant writing, inversions, lack of coordination, etc.

• Visual dyslexia: affecting attention required to read, characterized by inversions, omissions, additions, approximative reformulation, etc.

Dyslexia can be associated with other troubles, such as dysgraphia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, dysphasia, ADHD, etc.

• Learning difficulty with reading or writing

• Attention troubles, difficulty concentrating or with comprehension

• Difficulty to differentiate words or letters that look similar

• Difficulty to spell unknown or lengthy words

• Motor, memory, or coordination problems

There is no cure for dyslexia. Speech reeducation can be helpful to decrease the symptoms of this learning disability. These solutions consist of several sessions based on:

• Phonetic exercises which help with decoding letters and sounds while also improving short term verbal memory.

• Exercises aiming to improve visual and verbal attention, allowing phonemes and irregular word assimilation

• Writing and spelling exercises, helping association with word form

When dyslexia degrades life quality of the person who is suffering, speech therapy should be accentuated by a multidisciplinary care plan, using psychotherapy, psychomotor therapy, and music therapy.

1. https://www.eaneurology.org/fileadmin/user_upload/22_E-PC-EAN-role_of_neurology-Deuschl-FINAL.doc

Fiche Dyslexia

• Author : Florian Reinaud, MD
• Date : Jun 15, 2017
• Author of revisions : Amine Morjane, MD
• Revision date : Jul 09, 2019