by Laura Lytton

Created on: July 05, 2007

COGNITIVE EXPLANATIONS OF DYSLEXIA

This essay will provide an account of the cognitive explanations of dyslexia. In order to do this it will firstly look at how the condition is experienced by individuals and will assess the extent to which the core behavioral symptoms of dyslexia can be attributed to cognitive deficits. As an analysis of the cognitive explanation is presented, an overview will be given of the alternative explanations, highlighting where they coexist and/or compliment the cognitive explanations. To conclude, the condition will be considered using Frith's 3 level framework.

Dyslexia is typified by difficulties in the acquisition of literacy. Individuals with dyslexia have difficulties in the representation, storage and retrieval of speech sounds. These difficulties affect their ability to achieve expected norms in terms of literacy and mathematics. They have particular difficulties with coding: learning and retrieving associations between verbal and visual information and often experience other difficulties arising with sequencing and learning information by rote (i.e. months of the year and multiplication tables). The written expression of ideas and physical co-ordination are also often affected and directional confusions are common as are problems remembering left from right (Wood and Richardson, 2002).

In terms of the cognitive explanations of dyslexia the observable behavioral symptoms outlined above fall into the following categories: phonological processing difficulties; visual difficulties; rate of processing; automaticity and memory deficits and there are converging lines of evidence which suggest that individuals experience these difficulties. But, of the myriad of behavioral symptoms of dyslexia (and reading difficulties in general) the most omnipresent of cognitive impairments appears to be a deficit in phonological processing.

Phonological processing is the higher order cognitive processing associated with the awareness and usage of the sound and the structure of language when individuals process written and verbal information. The phonological deficit theory of dyslexia is a cognitive deficit theory which explains the reading difficulties experienced by concluding that learning to read requires learning the grapheme-phoneme correspondence (the correspondence between letters and constituent speech sounds). If these sounds are poorly represented, stored, or retrieved, learning of these correspondences will be affected. The phonological

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