Dyslexia research

Dyslexia is about having problems with a culture's visual notation of speech. The form of the notation varies according to the writing system adopted and developed by each culture. Much of the early dyslexia research was based in cultures that adopted a Latin Alphabetic writing systems.

The Orthography of language has its origins in the Writing Systems developed or adopted by each culture, which varies around the world. There are also orthological differences within eachof the main writing systems

Dyslexia was first identified by Oswald Berkhan in 1881, and the term 'dyslexia' later coined in 1887 by Rudolf Berlin, an ophthalmologist practicing in Stuttgart, Germany. The history of dyslexia has been the history of dyslexia research.

The theories should not be seen as competing, but viewed as theories trying to explain the underlying causes of a similar set of symptoms from a variety of research perspectives and background.

The medical research of dyslexia began with the examination of post autopsy of brains from people who had dyslexia, which led to the present day genetic research regarding dyslexia. The parallel evolution of both the theories of dyslexia and the brain scan technology inspired the current interest in researching the cognitive neurological causes of dyslexia.

In recent years there has been significant debate on the categorization of dyslexia. In particular, Elliot and Gibbs argue that "attempts to distinguish between categories of 'dyslexia' and 'poor reader' or 'reading disabled' are scientifically unsupportable, arbitrary and thus potentially discriminatory".

While acknowledging that reading disability is a valid scientific curiosity, and that "seeking greater understanding of the relationship between visual symbols and spoken language is crucial" and that while there was "potential of genetics and neuroscience for guiding assessment and educational practice at some stage in the future", they conclude that "there is a mistaken belief that current knowledge in these fields is sufficient to justify a category of dyslexia as a subset of those who encounter reading difficulties".

...
Wikipedia