Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a very broad term defining a learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in being able to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, processing speed, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, language skills/verbal comprehension, and/or rapid naming.

Dyslexia is distinct from reading difficulties resulting from other causes, such as a non-neurological deficiency with vision or hearing, or from poor or inadequate reading instruction. It is believed that dyslexia can affect between 5 and 10 percent of a given population although there have been no studies to indicate an accurate percentage.

There are three proposed cognitive subtypes of dyslexia (auditory, visual and attentional), although individual cases of dyslexia are better explained by specific underlying neuropsychological deficits and co-occuring learning disabilities (e.g. attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, math disability, etc.). Reading disability, or dyslexia, is the most common learning disability. Although it is considered to be a receptive language-based learning disability in the research literature, dyslexia also affects one's expressive language skills,. Researchers at MIT found that people with dyslexia exhibited impaired voice-recognition abilities.

Adult dyslexics can read with good comprehension, but they tend to read more slowly than non-dyslexics and perform more poorly at spelling and nonsense word reading, a measure of phonological awareness. Dyslexia and IQ are not interrelated as a result of cognition developing independently.