It is estimated that between 10 and 15% of the world's population has dyslexia. The International Code of Diseases states that people with this condition “characteristically manifest difficulties in reciting the alphabet, naming letters, performing simple rhymes, and analyzing or classifying sounds. Furthermore, reading is characterized by omissions, substitutions, distortions, inversions or addictions, slowness, hesitations, visual tracking problems, and deficits in comprehension.”
Dyslexia is included in the learning difficulties that occur in childhood and its early diagnosis is essential to carry out specific follow-up for children who have this condition. Not in vain, reading and writing skills are essential from school age and will continue to be so in adult life. Within dyslexia, there are different types.
From the OMA-Psychology and Speech Therapy blog they indicate that there are several types of dyslexia, among which two are the most frequent: phonological dyslexia and surface dyslexia.
They define phonological dyslexia as one in which the person makes a visual reading of the words in a global way, deducing (not reading) the words that are familiar to them. This is precisely the type of reading we carry out when we look at a quick glance for a specific word at the center of a text. However, this practice gives rise to errors regarding reading comprehension.
The most frequent errors in this type of dyslexia are difficulty reading unknown words or pseudowords; omissions, substitutions, inversions and additions of letters; lexicalization of pseudowords (such as reading 'lion' instead of 'lean'); derivational errors (reading ‘joy’ instead of ‘joyful’); and substitution of function words (such as changing 'for' to 'for').
On the other hand, surface dyslexia is the most common in children, according to OMA-Psychology and Speech Therapy. When they suffer from it, they need to read letter by letter, which affects their reading speed and understanding of what they are reading. This is because they are more focused on decoding (the letter-sound conversion process) than on attending to the content of the reading itself.
In surface dyslexia, the most common errors are the inability to read irregular words; make spelling mistakes; slowness and errors of accentuation; and difficulty understanding homophones.
From OMA-Psychology and Speech Therapy they insist that failure to detect this disorder early can lead to various problems such as low school grades, low self-esteem or common labels such as "lazy children." “Having dyslexia does not mean having little ability, but rather that children process information differently,” they emphasize.
"For this reason, it is important to attend from the first moment to any suspicion in children who have just begun the literacy process and handle the situation with a positive attitude on the part of both the family and the school," the experts advise.
