Explaining Away Dyslexia

Does Dyslexia Exist?

“…While a discrepancy between IQ and measured reading ability has long been a key criterion for dyslexia used by clinicians (McNab, 1994;Presland, 1991), more recent research studies have demonstrated that the difficulties encountered by 'dyslexics' are largely independent of intellectual functioning (Fletcher et al, 1994;Stanovich and Stanovich, 1997). While more intellectually able poor readers will be able to use semantic and syntactic knowledge to help them make more sense of passages of text, this is of no help to them when they are asked to read single words-the key task for the study of dyslexia (Grigorenko, 2001;Stanovich, 1991;Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling and Scanlon, 2004).…”

Book Reviews

“…The contrasting views that the concepts of 'specific learning difficulties' and 'specific developmental dyslexia' themselves represent a theoretically impoverished pseudo-science (Kavalle and Forness, 1985;Presland, 1991) versus one which argues that a conceptual consensus is now emerging (Hammill, 1990) underline the nature of the ongoing controversy. As long as the dialectic does not reduce to acrimony, eventually a synthesis is likely to be developed.…”

Questions from a social psychology perspective

“…They also reject aspects of statistical discrepancy definitions which might be 'manipulated at will' (p 189), although they may appeal to other cognitive psychologists who would maintain the relevant dichotomies around objectivity/ subjectivity, tenability/untenability and truth/untruth (eg Ashton, 1996). Stanovich (1994) comprehensively reviews research literature in the cognitive paradigm concluding that there is no support for 'a scientific concept of dyslexia' (p 588), and brings into question, as do others (Solity, 1996;Presland, 1991) the existence of dyslexia. More recently, Frederickson and Reason (1995) proposed the diagnostic utility of identifying particular cognitive psychological features (phonological awareness) in identifying dyslexia but then have to defend this position when other, perhaps mutually tenable, arguments are made Whittaker, 1996;Solity, 1996;Reason and Frederickson, 1996).…”