Profound dyslexia is a form of acquired dyslexia caused by brain damage, resulting in difficulty reading and processing visual language. It is often caused by damage to the left side of the brain and can result in semantic errors. Treatment involves building phonetic awareness through tutoring.
Profound dyslexia is also known as acquired dyslexia or alexia. It is one of two forms of dyslexia. Unlike developmental dyslexia, acquired dyslexia is not present at birth. Acquired dyslexia occurs when the parts of the brain that deal with reading and speaking are damaged. A person with acquired dyslexia could read and process visual language correctly before the impairment occurred.
Dyslexia is a condition that affects the way a person reads, processes and interprets visual language. Research has shown that although dyslexia is neurological, it is also due to a lack of phonemic awareness. When a person lacks phonemic awareness, sounds cannot be linked correctly to letters. With profound dyslexia, words come out wrong when reading and understanding. A person with this type of dyslexia has acquired sufficient knowledge of the phonemes and sounds of words, but they process them poorly in the brain.
Profound dyslexia is the result of damage to the dominant side of a person’s brain. Most commonly, the damage occurs on the left side. In rare cases, this form of dyslexia occurs due to damage to the parietal or occipital lobes of the brain. It is extremely rare to find this dyslexia following a stroke, but it is possible. The damage that leads to this type of dyslexia is often the result of an infection that has spread to the brain, or from severe blows to the head that have caused permanent damage.
Semantic errors are more common with profound dyslexia than with other forms. Semantics is the process in which the brain connects words and their meanings. This form of dyslexia takes a word that is read and swaps it for a meaning or a closely related word. For example, the word error might appear as the wrong word, or the word “table” might appear as the word “chair.”
While profound dyslexia presents problems with being able to read aloud, it’s not a completely impossible task. For many dyslexics who have acquired this condition, areas on the healthy side of the brain are able to compensate for the damaged side. If, for example, there is damage to the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere may be able to compensate. Unfortunately, this can only happen if there is enough phonetic and semantic knowledge stored in a dyslexic’s memory.
Treatment for profound dyslexia is similar to treatments for developmental dyslexia. In this case, the focus is on building phonetic awareness. Tutoring begins with identifying individual letter sounds and the symbols that represent them. From then on, the difficulty increases as blended sounds and full words are gradually introduced.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
