The Neurobiology of Reading Difficulties

Abstract

There is very little agreement about why so many otherwise intelligent children experience such difficulty learning to read. Some people still believe that their problems are purely linguistic. Others take the view that difficulty with learning to read derives from more basic deficiencies in processing the sensory inputs that are required for reading. In this chapter, the author will discuss how normal reading depends on the quality of its sensory input; it absolutely requires both a highly sensitive visual magnocellular system to acquire good orthographic skills and a sensitive auditory transient system to develop the ability to parse the phonological structure of words. He then speculates about the genetic and immunological mechanisms that may be responsible for the wide variety of abnormalities that are seen in developmental dyslexics. In conclusion, reading difficulties are neither specific to reading nor exclusively linguistically based, but a consequence of mildly impaired development of a particular kind of neurons in the brain, magnocellular neurons, so that dyslexia has widespread manifestations, which are not at all confined to reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: chapter)