What kinds of things cause children’s reading difficulties?

Abstract

The first part of this paper explains the distinction between proximal and distal causes of developmental disorders of cognition, with special reference to developmental disorders of reading. A number of different proximal causes of developmental disorders of reading have been identified. These correspond to a number of different patterns of developmental reading impairments – a number of “types of developmental dyslexia”, if you like – which are described in the second part of the paper. These patterns are interpreted in relation to a specific information-processing model of the cognitive system for reading. How each pattern is diagnosed, and how each might be treated, is discussed.

Acknowledgements

I thank Anne Castles, Naama Friedmann, Saskia Kohnen and Genevieve McArthur for many opportunities over the years to discuss issues with which this paper is concerned, and Tim Bates for numerous excellent comments on an earlier draft of the paper.

Notes

1. This claim is not tautologous because, as is explained later in the paper, there are at least six ways in which a child can be a poor reader even when that child has a normal sight vocabulary.

2. “Grapheme” means “a letter or sequence of letters that corresponds to a single phoneme”.

3. I should point out that no cases of developmental attentional dyslexia or developmental neglect dyslexia have yet been reported in English-reading children I discuss these two conditions for the sake of completeness and to indicate how they would be recognized if occurring in English.