Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Catherine McBride

In this talk, I offer an introduction to concepts of dyslexia. I first consider two well-accepted but somewhat contradictory definitions of the disorder and then highlight some environmental factors that are important for understanding it worldwide using Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) Ecological Systems Model.  The nature of children’s different languages and scripts are additionally important for understanding the manifestation of dyslexia.  Of particular interest is identifying cognitive correlates of dyslexia around the world, for both diagnostic and remediation purposes. These include both segmental and suprasegmental phonological sensitivity, morphological awareness in the forms of inflections, derivations, or lexical compounding, visual-spatial or visual-motor skills, writing difficulties, and fluency. However, the degree to which each of these are markers of reading difficulties likely depends upon a given child's orthography, language, and basic cultural environment.