Dyslexia Information

  • In the public education setting, dyslexia is described as a specific learning disability in reading.

    According to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, the prevalence rate for dyslexia is estimated to range from 5% to 17% of school-age children.
     
    According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, common features of dyslexia include the following:
    • Difficulties in the ability to notice, think about, and work with individual sounds in words (phonemic awareness)
    • Difficulties in detecting and discriminating differences in phonemes or speech sounds (phonological processing)
    • Difficulty with word decoding (fluency, rate of reading, rhyming, spelling, vocabulary, comprehension, and written expression)
     

     

     

     

    Common misconceptions about dyslexia include the following: 

    Myth:  Letter reversals are a sign of dyslexia. 

    Fact:  Letter reversals are reasonably common in children up to second or third grade.

     

     
    Myth: Dyslexia is caused by a visual processing disorder.

    Fact: In the vast majority of cases, dyslexia/specific learning disability in reading is not caused by a visual processing disorder, but is a language based disorder.