Symptoms and Causes of Dyslexia

People with dyslexia have normal intelligence and usually have normal vision. Most children with dyslexia can succeed in school with tutoring or a specialized education program. Emotional support also plays an important role.

Dyslexia is a learning disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words (decoding). Also called reading disability, dyslexia affects areas of the brain that process language.

Before school

Signs that a young child may be at risk of dyslexia include:

Late talking
Learning new words slowly
Problems forming words correctly, such as reversing sounds in words or confusing words that sound alike
Problems remembering or naming letters, numbers and colors
Difficulty learning nursery rhymes or playing rhyming games

School-age

Once your child is in school, dyslexia signs and symptoms may become more apparent, including:

Reading well below the expected level for age
Problems processing and understanding what he or she hears
Difficulty finding the right word or forming answers to questions
Problems remembering the sequence of things
Difficulty seeing (and occasionally hearing) similarities and differences in letters and words
Inability to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word
Difficulty spelling
Spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing
Avoiding activities that involve reading

Teens and adults

Dyslexia signs in teens and adults are similar to those in children. Some common dyslexia signs and symptoms in teens and adults include:

Difficulty reading, including reading aloud
Slow and labor-intensive reading and writing
Problems spelling
Avoiding activities that involve reading
Mispronouncing names or words, or problems retrieving words
Trouble understanding jokes or expressions that have a meaning not easily understood from the specific words (idioms), such as "piece of cake" meaning "easy"
Spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing
Difficulty summarizing a story
Trouble learning a foreign language
Difficulty memorizing
Difficulty doing math problems