Developmental dyslexia: clinical aspects

Developmental dyslexia: clinical aspects

M. S. Thambirajah is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist working in Dudley and Walsall Mental Health Partnership Trust. He is the author of Case Studies in Child and Adolescent Mental Health (Radcliffe Publishing 2007) and Psychological Basis of Psychiatry (Elsevier 2005) and co-author of Understanding School Refusal (Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2007). Correspondence Dr M. S. Thambir...

Developmental dyslexia.

T he term developmental dyslexia ("specific reading retardation") refers to an unexpected difficulty in reading in children and adults who otherwise possess the intelligence, motivation, and schooling considered necessary for accurate and fluent reading. The concept has had a chequered career, with debates about its definition, origin, and causes, and indeed about its validity as a distinct ent...

Developmental Dyslexia

The possible causes and correlates of such difficulty have been the focus of a great deal of theorizing since before the turn of the twentieth century, when W. Pringle Morgan (1896) described a 14-year-old boy named Percy who suffered from pronounced difficulty learning to read and spell, despite normal achievement in other academic areas. Because he could find no evidence of definitive brain i...

Developmental Dyslexia

Varieties of developmental dyslexia.

This paper reviews and evaluates the evidence for the existence of distinct varieties of developmental dyslexia, analogous to those found in the acquired dyslexic population. Models of the normal adult reading process and of the development of reading in children are used to provide a framework for considering the issues. Data from a large-sample study of the reading patterns of developmental d...