14 DAY TRIAL // Dyslexia, a developmental reading disorder, is a disability that occurs when the human brain is not capable of recognizing and processing certain symbols properly. A new study demonstrates that this disorder has nothing to do with IQ levels, as previous researches had indicated.
Naturally, dyslexia affects children more than adults, and is very widespread indeed. Official statistics show that between 5 and 10 percent of all American children are dyslexic, while very few of them receive support for their condition in school.
Since the name was first adopted, dyslexia has been a term used to describe intelligent, articulate kids, who for some reasons had problems reading and understanding written symbols. Importantly, it was also widely believed that dyslexia was a mismatch between high IQ and low reading skills.
Conversely, children with low IQ and reading disabilities were considered to be in this state due to their genetic cognitive limitations, and not necessarily because they suffered from any disorder. The study conducted by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows this separation is false.
The MIT group was able to conduct an in-depth investigation of several children, using advanced brain-imaging techniques to look at their brain activity during several tasks. The work revealed the current understanding of dyslexia to be shallow at best.
“We found that children who are poor readers have the same brain difficulty in processing the sounds of language whether they have a high or low IQ,” MIT Grover Hermann professor of health sciences and technology and cognitive neuroscience John D. E. Gabrieli explains.
“Reading difficulty is independent of other cognitive abilities,” adds the expert, who led the new study with Stanford University School of Medicine colleague Fumiko Hoeft, as well as investigators at the York University and MIT expert Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli.
Details of the research have already been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of the esteemed journal Psychological Science. The findings are bound to stir some controversy, but the team hopes that this will also raise awareness for dyslexic children.
In the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests the team conducted, 131 children of various IQ levels – and all suffering from dyslexia – were found to have the same type of neural activity regardless of their cognitive abilities, or lack thereof.
“The brain patterns could not have been more similar, whether the child had a high or low IQ,” Gabrieli concludes.