Dyslexia in children: what is it, diagnosis and treatment?

A dyslexia in children remains an unresolved issue in the classroom.
Children with dyslexia are more likely to see their influenced academic performance. How to Formal diagnosis can only be made after entry into basic educationit is common not to be detected as early as would be desirable.

There are more than 120 thousand students affected by dyslexia in Portugal, and in both cases families play a fundamental role early detectionas in the treatment of childhood dyslexia.
Although specialized public mechanisms exist, it is often parents who identify first Signs of dyslexia in preschool children. That’s why it’s so important to know them!

How to help a dyslexic child? We show you what the main signs are and how to treat dyslexia in children and young people in primary and secondary education.

What is dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a neurological disorder in which it manifests itself difficulty learning to read. It involves problems identifying speech sounds and how they relate to letters and words.

Dyslexia has no relation to the child’s intelligence. It is a disorder that affects the part of the brain linked to language. It is generally identified in the early stages of childhood. While it cannot be cureddyslexia in children can be treated. And with great success!

Even so, many people are only diagnosed in adulthood. That’s why a comprehensive health insurancewhich gives access to monitoring by specialized professionals and diagnostic tests, is highly recommended.

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Types of dyslexia in children

There are different types of childhood dyslexia, which develop differently.

On the one hand there is the acquired dyslexia. This occurs after an illness or brain injury. This type of dyslexia results from damage to the areas of the brain that process reading and writing.

A child may also have a developmental dyslexia. This develops naturally, without being associated with brain damage. It is generally detected in school environments. Within this type of childhood dyslexia, three subtypes can be distinguished:

1. superficial dyslexia – is the most common in children. Surface dyslexia is related to poor information processing in the direct visual, lexical or nervous pathways. This means that children can pronounce words well, even if they don’t make sense, but they have to break them into fragments or syllables to be able to read them. For these children the situation becomes more problematic when the words do not correspond to the pronunciation. This is the case of words in which a letter is not pronounced in the usual way – for example, when the “x” is pronounced as “z” (“exercise”) –, or when a letter is not pronounced, as in the word “question”;
   
2. phonological dyslexia –This type is associated with the brain areas responsible for processing speech sounds and makes it difficult to read very long, unknown or infrequent words. They may omit and/or swap syllables, or be unable to verbalize the subtraction of syllables (for example, in the word “caravela” they say “vela” when asked to remove the first two syllables). However, children with phonological dyslexia usually do not have problems with the most frequent words, since they use the visual route;
   
3. profound dyslexia – it is the most serious form of dyslexia, since the child has difficulties in both the phonological and visual pathways.