Dyslexia info

Dyslexia: A Natural Phenomenon

Abstract

Social institutions and their rules often originated from capricious decisions. For education, western text book design has never been questioned as to its possible bias against some children's perceptual organizational strategies. Text book design with its "Z" encoding often conflicts with the a priori "S" encoding and decoding paradigms found in natural perception. Orthography is another flawed social tool replete with anachronistic distractions. These factors results in social and perceptual rule conflicts inhibiting children's (or adult's) attempts to decode and encode English alphanumeric signs and symbols. These conflicts are often misinterpreted or ridiculed by the educational culture leading to the child's impaired performance (but not learning) sometimes termed dyslexia denoting a class of impaired people without reading and writing skills due to some brain disorder. Experts often refer to the reversal of numbers and letters as indicators of dyslexia. However, reversals are part of natural perception and we deal with them everyday, and ignore them as part of our perceptual background. This paper suggests that persistent reversals are aligned with confusing perceptual, pedagogic and orthographic rules rather than brain impaired reading and writing skills. What is troublesome is that many labeled dyslexics become "cured," often on their own, and end up becoming authors, scholars, scientists, etc. This suggests that environmental forces such as negative reinforcement found within the educational community are factors delaying lexic development.

Dyslexia Redefined

Dyslexia is buzz word with intolerable ambiguity. Among others, dyslexia is generally defined as the reversal of letters and numbers due to some brain disorder. However, in this paper dyslexia is defined as the left-to-right reversal of letters and numbers due to confusing perceptual codifying rules in conflict with arbitrary textbook designs further complicated by English orthography and dysfunctional institutional behaviors. It should become clear that the left-to-right reversal of alphanumeric symbols is a natural, evolutionary, rule-governed form of perception. By dysfunctional institutional behavior, I maintain that the confused left-to-right reversal process is often reinforced by emotional trauma, shame, negative attitudes, unfounded beliefs, low self-esteem, etc., tacitly or overtly given off by the school culture that places the student in a state of perpetual confusion. I will also suggest that the child’s traumatized state of confusion could itself limit the development of his brain's functionality. By orthography, I mean the present state of English spelling that is the very essence of sociodyslexia because of the chaos in phonemic and graphemic rules. The dysfunctional state of English orthography is a deficit transferred to the student. It is indefensible to hold that there is an intuitive connection in such examples as the long i: tie, by, bye, high, and hi to name a few. Only etymologists understand their origins and interconnectedness. Words are tools of communication, and like any tool, they need to be adapted to their user or be discarded. No one in their right mind would use bent hammers or ancient computers and be efficient and effective in today’s world, yet we refuse to change our awkward orthographic tools opting for spell checkers and wasted dictionary time, all the while insisting our children should adapt to these anachronisms rather than making the tool adapt to the user's needs. Texts that indiscriminately mix orthographic variations without proper historical linguistic training produce a stumbling phonetic interpretation in dyslexic (rule confused) children and adults. A child's attention span cannot handle the drudgery and repeated failures and quickly turns her attention to more important things such as daydreaming. An adult can handle it, and this is a possible explanation for sudden recovery of lexic ability. Clearly, such a person is ideal for designing dyslexic's text books. By natural, I mean preexisting organic processes and their rules that are the referents to our observations and their symbolic expressions.

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