Dr. Sally Shaywitz, a director of the Center for Dyslexia and Creativity at Yale University, was quoted in a recent New York Times article, “Study Sheds Light on Auditory Role in Dyslexia.” She said the study “demonstrates the centrality of spoken language in dyslexia — that it’s not a problem in meaning, but in getting to the sounds of speech.”
Pam Belluck’s Times article noted that the study – published in Science by MIT professor John Gabrieli and graduate student Tyler Perrachione – suggests that how dyslexics hear language may be more important than previously thought. According to Belluck:
“Gabrieli said the findings underscored a critical problem for dyslexic children learning to read: the ability of a child hearing, say, a parent or teacher speak to connect the auditory bits that make up words, called phonemes, with the sight of written words. If a child has trouble grasping the sounds that make up language, he said, acquiring reading skills will be harder. The research shows that spoken language deficiencies persist even when dyslexics learn to read well. The study subjects were mostly ‘high-functioning, high-I.Q. young adults who had overcome their reading difficulty,’ Dr. Gabrieli said. ‘And yet when they had to distinguish voices, they were not one iota better with the English-language voices that they’ve heard all their life.’ Experts said the new study also shows the interconnectedness of the brain processes involved in reading. . . . This research shows that normal reading involves a ‘circuit, the ability to have all of those components integrated absolutely automatically,’ said Maryanne Wolf, a dyslexia expert at Tufts University. ‘One of the great weaknesses in dyslexia is that the system is not able to integrate these phoneme-driven systems’ with other aspects of language comprehension. As a follow-up, the M.I.T. researchers have been scanning the brains of subjects performing voice recognition and other activities, and have found ‘very big differences in dyslexics and nondyslexics in a surprisingly broad range of tasks,’ Dr. Gabrieli said. ‘We think there might be a broader kind of learning that’s not operating very well in these individuals and that in some areas you can circumvent it pretty well. But in language and reading, it’s hard to circumvent.’ . . . Dr. Shaywitz said the study also has implications for teaching.”