Diagnosing Dyslexia

• Begins to develop awareness that, like a roll of perforated postage stamps, sentences and then words come apart
• Shows an interest in the sounds of language; repeats and plays with sounds, especially rhymes; recites nursery rhymes (“Humpty Dumpty,” “Jack and Jill”?
• Identifies ten alphabet letters, most likely from his or her own name

• Breaks spoken words into syllables (such as today – to-day) (50 percent of children can count the number of syllables in a spoken word)
• Begins to break words into phonemes (20 percent of children can count the number of phonemes in a spoken word)
• Recognizes and names a growing number of letters

• Compares whether two spoken words rhyme: Do cat and mat rhyme? Do hope and mat rhyme?
• Names a word that rhymes with a simple word like cat or make
• Recognized and names just about all upper-and lowercase letters

• Continues to progress in breaking spoken words into syllables (90 percent of children can count the number of syllables in a word)
• Identifies which of three spoken words or pictures begin with the same sound as a given word (when instructed: Tell me which word begins with the same first sound as car: mat, can, or dog – he answers can) or with a different sound than the other two (when asked which word begins with a different sound – man, dog, or mud – he answers dog)
• Pronounces the beginning sound in a word (when asked to say the first sound of the word mat, he answers “mmmm”)
• Counts the number of phonemes in a small word (when asked to count the sounds he hears in me, he finds two: accomplished by 70-80 percent of children)
• Blends (pushes together) phonemes into a complete word (when asked what word the sounds “zzzz,” “oo” make, he answers zoo)

• Names all the letters of the alphabet
• Knows the sounds of almost all the letters of the alphabet
• Masters the alphabetic principle; understands that the sequence of letters within a written word represents the number and sequence of sounds heard in the spoken word
• Begins to decode simple words
• Recognizes a growing number of common words by sight (you, my, are, is, the)
• Uses invented spelling, such as writing krr for car
• Writes many uppercase and lowercase letters
• Writes his or her own name (first and last) and names of family members or pets

• Counts the sounds in longer (three-phoneme) words (when asked, Can you count the sounds you hear in same?, he answers three)
• Says what word remains if a given sounds is taken away from the beginning or end of a three-phoneme word (when instructed, Say bat without saying the “b”, he says at)
• Blends the sounds in three-phoneme words (when asked, What word do the sounds, “m,” “aaaa,” “n” form?, he answers man)

• Reads aloud with accuracy and comprehension any test that is meant for first grade
• Links letters to sounds to decode unknown words
• Accurately decodes one-syllable words (real words like sit and bath, and nonsense words like zot and shan)
• Knows sounds of common letter groups or word families such as –ite and –ate
• Recognizes by sight common irregularly spelled words (which do not follow the pattern of a word family), such as have, said, where, two
• Has reading vocabulary of three hundred to five hundred words, including sight words and words that are easy to sound out
• Monitors his or her own reading
• Self-corrects if an incorrectly identified word does not fit with cues provided by the letters in the word or with cues provided by the context surrounding the word
• Reads simple instructions such as “Open your book”
• Begins to spell accurately short, easy words

• Routinely links letters to sounds to decode unknown words
• Begins to learn strategies fro breaking multisyllabic words into syllables
• Accurately reads some multisyllable real and nonsense words, such as Kalamazoo
• Begins to read with fluency – reads accurately, smoothly, rapidly, and with inflection
• Reads and comprehends fiction and nonfiction meant for second grade
• Represents the complete sound of a word when spelling
• Reads on his own voluntarily

• Reads aloud with fluency and comprehension any text meant for third grade
• Uses knowledge of prefixes, suffixes, and roots to infer meanings of words
• Reads longer fiction selections and chapter books
• Summarizes the main points from readings
• Correctly spells previously studied words
• Uses a dictionary to learn the meaning of unknown words

• Read to learn
• Reads for pleasure and for information

Key is knowing how to recognize them at different periods during development. Therefore, I have gathered the clues together to provide three distinct portraits of dyslexia: first, in early childhood from preschool through the first grade: next, in school-age children from second grade on; and, last, in young adults and adults.

• Trouble learning common nursery rhymes such as “jack and Jull” and “Humpty Dumpty”
• A lack of appreciation of rhymes
• Mispronounced words; persistent baby talk
• Difficulty in learning (and remembering) names of letters
• Failure to know the letters in his own name

• Failure to understand that words come apart; for example, that batboy can be pulled apart into bat and boy, and, later on, that the word bat can be broken down still further and sounded out as: “b” “aaaa” “t”
• Inability to learn to associate letters with sounds, such as being unable to connect the letter b with the “b” sound
• Reading errors that show no connection into the sounds of the letters; for example, the word big is read as goat
• The inability to read common one-syllable words or to sound out even the simplest of words, such as mat, cat, hop, nap
• Complaints about how hard reading is, or running and hiding when it is time to read
• A history of reading problems in parents or siblings

• Curiosity
• A great imagination
• The ability to figure things out
• Eager embrace of new ideas
• Getting the gist of things
• A good understanding of new concepts
• Surprising maturity
• A large vocabulary for the age group
• Enjoyment in solving puzzles
• Talent at building models
• Excellent comprehension of stories read or told to him

• Mispronunciation of long, unfamiliar, or complicated words; the fracturing of words – leaving out parts of words or confusing the order of the parts of words; for example, aluminum becomes amulium
• Speech that is not fluent – pausing or hesitating often when speaking, lots of um’s during speech, no glibness
• The use of imprecise language, such as vague references to stuff or things instead of the proper name of an object
• Not being able to find the exact word, such as confusing words that sound alike: saying tornado instead of volcano, substituting lotion for ocean, or humanity for humidity
• The need for time to summon an oral response or the inability to come up with a verbal response quickly when questioned
• Difficulty in remembering isolated pieces of verbal information (rote memory) – trouble remembering dates, names, telephone numbers, random lists

• Very slow progress in acquiring reading skills
• The lack of a strategy to read new words
• Trouble reading unknown (new, unfamiliar) words that must be sounded out; making wild stabs or guesses at reading a word; failure to systematically sound out words
• The inability to read small “function: words such as that, an, in
• Stumbling on reading multisyllable words, or the failure to come close to sounding out the full word
• Omitting parts of words when reading; the failure to decode parts within a word, as if someone had chewed a hole in the middle of the word, such as conible for convertible
• A terrific fear of reading out loud; the avoidance of oral reading
• Oral reading filled with substitutions, omissions, and mispronunciations
• Oral reading that is sloppy and labored, not smooth or fluent
• Oral reading that lacks inflection and sounds like the reading of a foreign language
• A reliance on context to discern the meaning of what is read
• A better ability to understand words in context than to read isolated single words
• Disproportionately poor performance on multiple choice tests
• The inability to finish tests on time
• The substitution of words with the same meaning for words in the text he can’t pronounce, such as car for automobile
• Disastrous spelling, with words not resembling the spelling; some spellings may be missed by spell check
• Trouble reading mathematics word problems
• Reading that is very slow and tiring
• Homework that never seems to end, or with parents often recruited as readers
• Messy handwriting despite what may be an excellent facility at word processing – nimble fingers
• Extreme difficulty learning a foreign language
• A lack of enjoyment in reading, and the avoidance of reading books or even a sentence
• The avoidance of reading for pleasure, which seems too exhausting
• Reading whose accuracy improves over time, though it continues to lack fluency and is laborious
• Lowered self-esteem, with pain that is not always visible to others
• A history of reading, spelling, and foreign language problems in family members

• Excellent thinking skills; conceptualization, reasoning, imagination, abstraction
• Learning that is accomplished best through meaning rather than rote memorization
• Ability to get the “big picture”
• A high level of understanding of what is read to him
• The ability to read and to understand at a high level overlearned (that is, highly practiced) words in a special area of interest; for example, if his hobby is restoring cars, he may be able to read auto mechanics magazines
• Improvement as an area of interest becomes more specialized and focused, when he develops a miniature vocabulary that he can read
• A surprisingly sophisticated listening vocabulary
• Excellence in areas not dependent on reading, such as math, computers, and visual arts, or excellence in more conceptual (versus factoid-driven) subjects such as philosophy, biology, social studies, neuroscience, and creative writing

• The maintenance of strengths noted in the school-age period
• A high learning capability
• A noticeable improvement when given additional time on multiple-choice examinations
• Noticeable excellence when focused on a highly specialized area such as medicine, law, public policy, finance, architecture, or basic science
• Excellence in writing if content and not spelling is important
• A noticeable articulateness in the expression of ideas and feelings

• Exceptional empathy and warmth, and feeling for others
• Success in areas not dependent on rote memory
• A talent for high-level conceptualization and the ability to come up with original insights
• Big-picture thinking
• Inclination to think out of the box
• A noticeable resilience and ability to adapt

• Difficulty reading single words
• Particular difficulty decoding nonsense or unfamiliar words
• Reading comprehension often superior to decoding individual words
• Inaccurate and labored oral reading of passages
• Trouble reading small “function” words – that, is an, for
• Slow reading
• Poor spelling