Early Signs of Dyslexia
Children with dyslexia have difficulty with the sound system of language.
As young children, they struggle with phonological awareness, including skills such as rhyming, clapping syllables, or sequencing of sounds, which are fundamental to literacy acquisition. In addition, children may have difficulty remembering and retrieving information, understanding what is said to them, and expressing themselves. Research demonstrates that all of these skills are critical for the more complicated processes of reading and writing.
Dyslexia is not something that a child will outgrow. If a parent has dyslexia, the chances are 35-40% that his/her child will be dyslexic.
One of the most common misconceptions about dyslexia is that it is a simple matter of reading words "backwards." Instead, it refers to differences in the brain that result in language learning difficulties associated with auditory skills.
A breakdown in these auditory skills can be observed in very young children when they struggle to recognize and create rhyming words, to identify the number of sounds in a word, and to blend sounds together to form words. For some students, the reading process is further complicated by visual processing and perceptual deficits.