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Theories about Developmental Dyslexia

Despite proving its usefulness for over a century, the concept of developmental dyslexia (DD) is currently in severe disarray because of the recent introduction of the phonological theory of its causation. Since mastering the phonological principle is essential for all reading, failure to do so cann...

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Autor principal: Stein, John
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9954267/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36831750
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13020208
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author Stein, John
author_facet Stein, John
author_sort Stein, John
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description Despite proving its usefulness for over a century, the concept of developmental dyslexia (DD) is currently in severe disarray because of the recent introduction of the phonological theory of its causation. Since mastering the phonological principle is essential for all reading, failure to do so cannot be used to distinguish DD from the many other causes of such failure. To overcome this problem, many new psychological, signal detection, and neurological theories have been introduced recently. All these new theories converge on the idea that DD is fundamentally caused by impaired signalling of the timing of the visual and auditory cues that are essential for reading. These are provided by large ‘magnocellular’ neurones which respond rapidly to sensory transients. The evidence for this conclusion is overwhelming. Especially convincing are intervention studies that have shown that improving magnocellular function improves dyslexic children’s reading, together with cohort studies that have demonstrated that the magnocellular timing deficit is present in infants who later become dyslexic, long before they begin learning to read. The converse of the magnocellular deficit in dyslexics may be that they gain parvocellular abundance. This may often impart the exceptional ‘holistic’ talents that have been ascribed to them and that society needs to nurture.
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spelling pubmed-99542672023-02-25 Theories about Developmental Dyslexia Stein, John Brain Sci Review Despite proving its usefulness for over a century, the concept of developmental dyslexia (DD) is currently in severe disarray because of the recent introduction of the phonological theory of its causation. Since mastering the phonological principle is essential for all reading, failure to do so cannot be used to distinguish DD from the many other causes of such failure. To overcome this problem, many new psychological, signal detection, and neurological theories have been introduced recently. All these new theories converge on the idea that DD is fundamentally caused by impaired signalling of the timing of the visual and auditory cues that are essential for reading. These are provided by large ‘magnocellular’ neurones which respond rapidly to sensory transients. The evidence for this conclusion is overwhelming. Especially convincing are intervention studies that have shown that improving magnocellular function improves dyslexic children’s reading, together with cohort studies that have demonstrated that the magnocellular timing deficit is present in infants who later become dyslexic, long before they begin learning to read. The converse of the magnocellular deficit in dyslexics may be that they gain parvocellular abundance. This may often impart the exceptional ‘holistic’ talents that have been ascribed to them and that society needs to nurture. MDPI 2023-01-26 /pmc/articles/PMC9954267/ /pubmed/36831750 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13020208 Text en © 2023 by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Review
Stein, John
Theories about Developmental Dyslexia
title Theories about Developmental Dyslexia
title_full Theories about Developmental Dyslexia
title_fullStr Theories about Developmental Dyslexia
title_full_unstemmed Theories about Developmental Dyslexia
title_short Theories about Developmental Dyslexia
title_sort theories about developmental dyslexia
topic Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9954267/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36831750
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13020208
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