DYSLEXIA AND HEARING IMPAIRMENT

So if you have read the article from PBS.org on Dyslexia (on the right hand side of this blog), you now know that it is poorly understood by the general population or more appropriately, completely misunderstood.  Most people believe that Dyslexia is characterized as a visual disability in which an individual perceives letters reversing and flipping as they are reading.  In fact, this is not the case.  Dyslexia is a disability in which the individual has a weak phonemic awareness or in simpler terms ability to hear the similarities and differences between phonemes or letter sounds. It is a language-based disability in which a person has trouble understanding words, sentences or paragraphs where both oral and written language are affected (site pg 9). It also affects both receptive and expressive language (site). (So far it seems we are describing a mild or possibly moderate hearing loss).  


Characteristics of dyslexia are:

• late to recognize letters
• trouble rhyming
• difficulty listing words that begin with the same sound
• slow to learn the sounds of letters and letter combinations
• difficulty recalling the sounds of letters and letter combinations rapidly
• trouble learning to recognize words
• difficulty learning to decode unknown words
• reads slowly and/or in a word-by-word manner
• reluctant to read
• weak spelling
• writes far less than other children
• difficulty understanding someone talk in noise

They also have difficulty with recognizing common 'sight' words.  All of these characteristics are also apparent in Hearing Impaired children.  The Hearing Impaired children, however, take the 'sight' word difficulty one step further: they usually omit them from their speech too, especially when the impairment was prelingual (before learning to speak).  Hearing Impaired children many times never develop the ability to rhyme.  And all this despite both groups exhibiting normal intelligence.


Now there are techniques that are successful in remediating the difficulties associated with Dyslexia and typically require intense drilling on letter/sound recognition and coordination.  This is also a technique used with hearing impaired children (primarily the lesser impairments) in order to strengthen their reading, writing, and spelling skills.   FM systems are also used in treatments for Dyslexics just as in cases of minimal and sometimes mild hearing impairment (site).  Dyslexia is also thought to be a result of frequent ear infections and glue ear in childhood (site), which are temporary hearing impairments that can lead to long term impairments if left untreated. 


All of the similarities of symptoms and signs of Dyslexia, the effects on education, and remediation give strong implications that there is likely a lesser hearing impairment that is not being recognized.  Would hearing aids resolve the issues of dyslexia at a faster pace than the remediation? Would they make learning easier for Dyslexic children?