What causes the Symptoms
What CAUSES these SYMPTOMS?
The Davis theory is that they all result from the same thing. The natural thinking style of a dyslexic person.
Signs of dyslexia can be difficult to recognize before your child enters school, but some early clues may indicate a problem. Once your child reaches school age, your child's teacher may be the first to notice a problem. Severity varies, but the condition often becomes apparent as a child starts learning to read.
Before school
Signs that a young child may be at risk of dyslexia include:
- Late talking
- Learning new words slowly
- Problems forming words correctly, such as reversing sounds in words or confusing words that sound alike
- Problems remembering or naming letters, numbers and colors
- Difficulty learning nursery rhymes or playing rhyming games
School age
Once your child is in school, dyslexia signs and symptoms may become more apparent, including:
- Reading well below the expected level for age
- Problems processing / understanding what they hear
- Difficulty finding the right word or forming answers
- Problems remembering the sequence of things
- Difficulty seeing or hearing similarities or differences in letters and words
- Inability to sound out the pronunciation of unfamiliar word
- Difficulty spelling
- Spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing
- Avoiding activities that involve reading
Teens and adults
Dyslexia signs in teens and adults are similar to those in children. Some common dyslexia signs and symptoms in teens and adults include:
- Difficulty reading, including reading aloud
- Slow and labor-intensive reading and writing
- Problems spelling
- Avoiding activities that involve reading
- Mispronouncing names or words, or problems retrieving words
- Trouble understanding jokes or expressions that have a meaning not easily understood from the specific words (idioms), such as "piece of cake" meaning "easy"
- Spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing
- Difficulty summarizing a story
- Trouble learning a foreign language
- Difficulty memorizing
- Difficulty doing math problems
Causes
Dyslexia tends to run in families. It appears to be linked to certain genes that affect how the brain processes reading and language, as well as risk factors in the environment.
Complications
Dyslexia can lead to a number of problems, including:
- Trouble learning. Because reading is a skill basic to most other school subjects, a child with dyslexia is at a disadvantage in most classes and may have trouble keeping up with peers.
- Social problems. Left untreated, dyslexia may lead to low self-esteem, behavior problems, anxiety, aggression, and withdrawal from friends, parents and teachers.
- Problems as adults. The inability to read and comprehend can prevent an adult from reaching his or her potential. This can have long-term educational, social and economic consequences.