Julie Clayton's Article Lost for Words

Clayton, Julie. (1999) Lost for Words. New Scientists Planet Science, 24.

Summary

The first point I came across in this article was understanding the meaning of this condition. Many people diagnosed with this disability are often not diagnosed properly. A lot of people are labeled as “slow learners.” People with dyslexia don’t have difficulty understanding the meanings of words or recognizing letters and shapes of letters. With this information, this has led scientists to believe that the problem is in the language centers of the brain. John Stein of Oxford University, specialist in vision, has a different opinion however. His theory is that this condition is a neurological problem that during the fetal development something attacks or damages the young cells as they are growing and try to connect to the inside of the brain. Some argue that this is a very selective attack by attacking only those nerves that relay information about fast changing events. The most controversial part of this theory is that the attack may come from the mother’s immune system.

The next point that I came across was when the article stated by Paula Talhal, of Rutgers University in Newark. She said that dyslexics have a problem with a variety of sounds. They fail to hear 2 pure tones as separate if they are presented too close together. Most people notice the gap between tones is about 40 milliseconds or more, but people with dyslexia find this too fast to detect. Researchers have also said that there is a link with auditory and visual problems. People, who have trouble detecting fast sound changes, also have trouble detecting rapidly changing visual signals. This correlates with people’s ability to read and spell. Stein then goes a step further by saying that chemical reactions of the body’s autonomic pilot, the cerebellum, are slightly different in people with dyslexia, which would explain why people with dyslexia are more clumsy and less coordinated than others.

The last point that I came across was Stein’s hopes that dyslexia will be seen as a far broader syndrome than how it is seen right now. His tests of visual perception could lead to other ways to find more subtle differences between people with dyslexia. “Armed with this knowledge teachers will be able to remediate a child’s particular weakness”. He would also like to see dyslexia diagnosed at an earlier age than it has been being done so.