Dyslexia & picture thinking

Many parents are searching for ways to help their child with reading, writing, math and in other areas affecting self-esteem and academics. Here's a short explanation written by Abigail Marshall for the Davis Dyslexia Association International's Dyslexic Reader explaining the difference between a "picture thinker" and a "word thinker". (I'm bringing these differences up because many who work with children are "word thinkers". A word thinker teaching a dyslexic can be kind of like teaching someone Spanish when you don't speak any Spanish yourself.)

In The Gift of Dyslexia, Ron Davis defines an “old solution” as the compulsive behavior that results when a strategy is adopted to cope with disorientation.

If you think primarily in words, and read well with good comprehension, then you probably are not experiencing disorientation when you read. It is not an “old solution" for you to use your word-thinking when reading or to subvocalize (silent speech or the internal speech made when reading a word, thus allowing the reader to imagine the sound of the word as it is read.). Rather, you are following a strategy that is natural for you.

Dyslexic individuals who use subvocalizing strategies often move their lips or actually utter the words as they read. A work thinker probably wouldn’t do that. They would probably hear the words automatically in their head, and would probably have very fast word-hearing skills.
If you have the brain structure typical for non-dyslexic readers, the pathway for listening to words and for understanding them is in the same part of the brain, in the left hemisphere. Dyslexics, however, use their brains differently. They usually have difficulty utilizing the pathway from their visual cortex to Wernicke’s area, which is the left mid-brain area that processes sounds of language during listening.

So when dyslexic individuals subvocalize, they are actually activating Broca’s area, which is in the left forebrain, and is involved in productive speech. Essentially they are bringing their motor function on line to produce the words in speech, because they can’t really imagine the sounds of the words unless they make them. Only then can their auditory-listening center start working.

For the dyslexic reader whose primary mode of thought is picture-thinking, the meaning needs to come from the right side of the brain. A dyslexic who reads with the sounds of words simply has to work much harder in order to make sense of the words. The reason Davis methods work so well for them is that they are able to utilize the right-brain pathways and their preference for visual thinking to connect the appearance of the words in print to their picture-based meaning.

For more information on the revolutionary methods of cognitive therapy for picture thinkers go to http://www.onpointlearning.org/