TO-21-06 – Dyslexia

Well I think the first thing to say is that, you mean, you call it stereotypical and there's actually quite

a lot of different sorts of errors that children with dyslexia will make. But your observation about

these, uh, modelled letters leads a lot of people to think that this is some kind of visual problem. In

actual fact, the problem that the child has is sorting out the sound sequence of the word. Because in

order to learn to read, what we have to do at a fine-grained level is we have to understand how the

speech sounds of words link to the letters of printed words. So if you take a simple word like cat,

we have to know that that splits into /k/, /æ/, /t/, and that those sounds link to the letters. What the

child who jumbles up letters is doing is not understanding the sound sequence. But they might make

other errors too. So they might, instead of the <c>, write <g> for example. Or instead of a <t>, write

<d>. So there are quite a lot of different sorts of errors that can stem from this really basic problem

in linking the speech sounds with the letters.

TO-21-06 – Dyslexia

Well I think the first thing to say is that, you mean, you call it stereotypical and there's actually quite

a lot of different sorts of errors that children with dyslexia will make. But your observation about

these, uh, modelled letters leads a lot of people to think that this is some kind of visual problem. In

actual fact, the problem that the child has is sorting out the sound sequence of the word. Because in

order to learn to read, what we have to do at a fine-grained level is we have to understand how the

speech sounds of words link to the letters of printed words. So if you take a simple word like cat,

we have to know that that splits into /k/, /æ/, /t/, and that those sounds link to the letters. What the

child who jumbles up letters is doing is not understanding the sound sequence. But they might make

other errors too. So they might, instead of the <c>, write <g> for example. Or instead of a <t>, write

<d>. So there are quite a lot of different sorts of errors that can stem from this really basic problem

in linking the speech sounds with the letters.