Why ‘resilient dyslexics’ have good reading comprehension

Some dyslexics may improve their reading comprehension by baking cakes and playing strategy games rather than more traditional techniques such as learning the sounds of letters and phonological awareness.

That’s one surprising conclusion from a new published study on “resilient dyslexics” conducted by researchers at Tel Aviv University and the University of California-San Francisco. Dyslexia is a reading disorder characterized by a difficulty in “decoding” – that is, navigating between the visual form and sounds of a written language. But a subset of dyslexic people – so-called resilient dyslexics – exhibit remarkably high levels of reading comprehension despite their difficulties decoding. To find out what made these resilient dyslexics different the researchers peered into their brains. The team examined 55 English-speaking children aged 10-16 with a wide variety of reading disabilities. Half the children had been previously diagnosed with dyslexia. The researchers created a simple formula to calculate the difference between reading abilities and decoding skills. The participants were then scanned in an MRI. -- More....

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