Individual Differences in Dyslexia

With the phonological deficit hypothesis of dyslexia as a back-drop, this review discusses the issue of how indivdual differences in its behavioural manifestation should be conceptualised. It begins by reviewing ways of classifying children with dyslexia from a clinical perspective and proceeds to describe the cognitive neuropsychological approach to classification that has focused on the reading and spelling profiles of such children. It argues that children’s reading difficulties should be couched within the framework of typical reading development and that sub-typing systems that have not acknowledged developmental data have limitations. An interactive model of learning to read is used to propose that individual differences in dyslexia depend upon the severity of the phonological processing difficulties experienced by an individual child, the proficiency of other cognitive skills and the environment in which they learn.