BOLD explores... Dyslexia and Dyscalculia

I’m Michael A Skeide and I’m the head of the Research Group Learning and Early Childhood at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in Germany. And I’ve been studying dyslexia and dyscalculia for about more than a decade now.

So what fascinates me about dyslexia and dyscalculia research is that there are a number of apparent opposites. So, for example, reading and math difficulties affect high level cultural techniques, but at the same time, it can be traced back developmentally to very basic fundamental sensory capacities, like speech perception, for example. Another striking observation is that each child who meets criteria for dyslexia and dyscalculia has a unique cognitive profile, so a unique fingerprint of individual risks and resources. Still dyslexia and dyscalculia occur universally across all cultures studied so far.

I think the question about causes and consequences of dyslexia and dyscalculia can only be answered by longitudinal studies beginning in early childhood, ideally already in infancy. What we know from the few studies available so far is that children who go on to develop dyslexia have early difficulties in linking vision and speech and also fine-grained speech perception. Children with dyscalculia have early difficulties in making sense of numbers, be it patterns of dots or number symbols. But in any case of dyslexia and dyscalculia, both are multicausal in nature.

Regarding the universality of dyslexia and dyscalculia, one could say that each child with dyslexia, for example, experiences difficulties in linking speech to text. And this is the case no matter whether kids learn the English alphabet or Chinese logograms. And every child with dyscalculia finds it difficult to understand and to handle numbers. So in this sense, there are universal characteristics that are shared by virtually all children, but there are also important differences that I would like to mention. And to give one example in dyslexia, so dyslexia is diagnosed most often in English speaking cultures simply because their writing systems are the most inconsistent and intransparent, with respect to print to speech conversion rules. Think of how many different pronunciations of the letter A, for example, there are in English.

So there’s certainly a cultural unity, but also cultural diversity when it comes to dyslexia and dyscalculia. It’s often overlooked that reading, writing and recognising numbers are so fundamental capacities that dyslexia and dyscalculia affect children in virtually all classes, and not just reading or writing or math, and beyond educational achievement. Such negative learning experiences can even have serious mental health consequences, even severe forms of anxiety or depression. So yes, definitely dyslexia and dyscalculia have a large impact on children’s lives outside of school because letters and numbers are ever present.

So now more than ever in our digital worlds, imagine how exposed you are when you post text that is full of spelling mistakes on a social media platform. Or imagine you cannot place an order in an online shop because you are unable to solve a simple addition problem that is required in a number capture. A substantial proportion of children who go on to develop dyslexia already come to attention during language acquisition. So for example, they might find it more difficult to understand speech, to build a vocabulary or use grammar correctly and later they may be slow to say aloud a particular word corresponding to a picture in a picture book, or they may overhear rhymes when singing songs.

Children who go on to develop dyscalculia may be slower, or they may be less efficient when playing puzzles or playing with blocks or with board games in which they have to compare numbers. But none of these signs, I would say, are necessary or sufficient. So I consider a comprehensive, but at the same time sensitive early risk assessment as really important. So I think it’s very important to support children who are at risk or affected by dyslexia or dyscalculia. But at the same time, I also consider it as very important to support all children individually who struggle during learning in school and to provide them with individualised adaptive resources that helps them to make the best out of their potential and really be sensitive to their individual risks and resources.

Thank you so much for listening. If you want to learn more about dyslexia and dyscalculia research, you can go to our website skeidelab.com and to BOLD on bold.expert.