Catching dyslexia before it catches your child
Any child learning how to read can become frustrated at first, but once he gets the hang of it, reading can become fun. For a child with dyslexia, that day may never come.
Nadine Gaab, PhD, of Children’s Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience is enrolling 4-to-6 year old children in a study to diagnose and possibly reverse dyslexia before reading instruction has even started.
Of the 2.6 million 6-to-11 year old children diagnosed with learning disabilities in the United States, about 80 percent have dyslexia. In recent years, researchers have dispelled the myth that dyslexia is a problem of visual perception. Instead, dyslexia largely stems from difficulty in processing sounds quickly.
“Children with developmental dyslexia may be living in a world with in-between sounds,” Gaab says. “It could be that whenever I tell a dyslexic child ‘ga,’ they hear a mix of ‘ga,’ ‘ka,’ ‘ba,’ and ‘wa.’” This inability to process sounds becomes a problem when it’s time to turn written words into spoken language.
Gaab and her colleagues showed in 2007 that sound processing can be improved in 9- to 12-year-old dyslexic children with special video games that train them to listen carefully to changing sounds. After eight weeks of these games, the children showed better reading skills. What’s more, using brain imaging, Gaab showed that this training erased functional differences between the brains of dyslexic school-age children and other children.
In the new study, Gaab is looking for the same sound-processing problems in children as young as 4 who have a family member with dyslexia, then seeing if the children go on to develop dyslexia themselves. If dyslexia can be spotted sooner rather than later, it would give these children a fighting chance, sparing them many struggles in school.
The study will be testing children through the end of November and especially needs children without a family history of dyslexia to serve as controls, particularly if they’ve just entered kindergarten. Visit Gaab’s research lab for more information.
And as a reminder to everyone: just remember that dyslexia has nothing to do with one’s level of intelligence. After all, one of this year’s Nobel Prize winners wrestled with dyslexia as a child!
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