Developmental dyslexia is a specific learning disorder (SLD) that hinders reading accuracy. The causes, the symptoms, and how to get help.
It is not the teacher who teaches children to read. One might say it is always their mothers and fathers who do so, from the moment the child is still in the womb. That the ability to read words is a genetically determined skill is no longer a mystery. Children are born with specific competencies that, once they reach five or six years of age, allow them to automate this process simply through exposure to written language. All children who must learn alphabetic writing systems are able, within a short time (around two years of school), to read words quickly and accurately without paying any further attention to the act itself: automatically, as the name suggests.
This knowledge has been arrived at by studying the causes of a specific learning disorder (SLD) that prevents precisely this automatisation of the act of reading: developmental dyslexia, a disorder that hinders the speed and accuracy of reading. Dyslexic individuals are very slow and make many errors (substitutions, elisions, reversals, transpositions of letters): for example, they might read the word "finestra" as "vinestra" or "finistera" or "finerta", and so on.
These difficulties are not due to a lack of intelligence or limited attention capacity, nor to the methods used by the teacher to teach reading. Today the scientific community recognises that developmental dyslexia is a neurological disorder of genetic origin, and that this disorder persists over time and may manifest in association with other SLDs: dysorthographia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia. The precise biological and cognitive causes underlying dyslexia and its genetic components are, however, still widely debated.
Talking about dyslexia also means paying attention to the emotions and reactions of parents when they receive a diagnosis of dyslexia for their children and realise that they themselves may have passed on this disability. It is important that the professionals making the diagnosis, or associations such as the Associazione italiana dislessia (which brings together around 2,000 parents), help mothers or fathers to work through any "false feelings of guilt"; the child's diagnosis is often also an opportunity for the "carrier" parent to understand the origin of their own difficulty and to reread, in a new light, the frustrations frequently experienced over many years of school, or often in the workplace as well. Studies on the familial nature of developmental dyslexia show that 40 per cent of fathers and 23 per cent of mothers of children with developmental dyslexia are themselves affected by the same disorder.
Knowledge about the familial nature of developmental dyslexia is becoming increasingly widespread: it is ever more common for parents to ask child neuropsychiatry services to assess whether or not their child has the disorder. The advice from psychologists, doctors and the Associazione italiana dislessia is not to overstate concerns but to follow the first steps children take in literacy with careful attention: if difficulties in reading and writing are evident in January or February of the first year of primary school, it will be appropriate to contact a child neuropsychiatry service.
It is important that parents, paediatricians and nursery school educators pay close attention to the child's language development between the ages of four and six. All young children, up to the age of three, speak by "mangling" words; if this phenomenon persists to a noticeable degree beyond the age of four or five, it is advisable to have the child seen by a child neuropsychiatrist and a speech and language therapist. Speech disorders are, in 80 per cent of cases, a strong risk factor for a disorder affecting the automatisation of reading and writing.
The relationship between developmental dyslexia and learning written English is particularly pronounced. Why? In English-speaking countries the number of individuals with developmental dyslexia is much higher than in Italy; among the school-age population it ranges from 5 to 7 per cent, and in England the data provided by the British dyslexia association indicate, again among the school-age population, that 4 per cent of individuals have a severe form of the disorder. Is the brain of English people perhaps different from that of Italians? No. What is very different is the structure of the orthography. The English language contains a large number of irregular words, has a phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence far less regular than Italian (the European languages with the most regular orthography are Italian, Finnish and Slovenian) and has a large number of monosyllabic words. These characteristics make the process of reading and writing words more complex, and individuals with developmental dyslexia are particularly affected by this. If a child shows signs of dyslexia when reading the Italian language, this disorder would manifest far more intensely were they to find themselves in England or the United States.
Learning written English is a constant source of failure and frustration for Italian dyslexics. But there is more: English children take longer than Italian children to read and write words quickly and accurately — in fact they only achieve full mastery of their own language, which they practise every day, by the fourth year of primary school; it is therefore clear how disadvantaged Italian dyslexics are when learning this foreign language. New provisions from the Ministry of Education have introduced the English language from the first year of primary school onwards, but a recent circular establishes that all children who have a report of developmental dyslexia may be exempted from learning written English.