Acquired Dyslexia

DISCUSS SOME OF THE WAYS IN WHICH RESEARCH IN ADULT AQUIRED DYSLEXICS HAS ENHANCED OUR UNDERSTANDING OF HOW PEOPLE READ. The use of language is one of the most complex tasks the human brain must carry out. The way in which children acquire language is studied very carefully. This acquisition is enhanced by teaching from skilled language users, but in itself acquired by the child's own observation and learning. For this reason the acquisition of spoken language is perhaps more well documented then the taught acquisition of reading skills. It is hard to determine how the human brain deals with the task of reading the written word. It can not be determined by introspection or studying the human brain in action as this is not possible. The way Psychologists and Neuroscientists have developed to determine hoe humans read is to observe people who have suffered some form of brain damage and have thereby incurred some form of reading disability. This disability is known as acquired dyslexia. From the study of such patients several variations of a basic model have been developed to highlight the way in which the written word is processed in the brain. The model is subdivided in to two main processing routes, the Non Lexical Route and the Lexical route. A model produced based on theories from Coltheart (1981) shows that there are several routes to speech production in the brain. The eye first identifies the printed word. In the adult skilled reader the eye does not move in a smooth pattern but actually jumps to certain focus points in a sentence the brain itself actually fills in the missing words. It does this by top down processing in which the brain applies words to the sentence to make the overall meaning correct. The eye does not move smoothly but actually jumps from point to point. The term given to the period when the eye is stationary and focused on a particular point is called a fixation. It is at these fixations when the eye takes up the