Researchers from Vanderbilt's Peabody College have found that dyslexia overshadows other learning and reading disabilities in children.
Dyslexia is a common reading disability where a child confuses letters and struggles with sounding out words. This disorder has been the prime focus of studies conducted on reading disabilities, so much so that other common reading disabilities go unnoticed until they become problematic.
Researchers at Vanderbilt's Peabody College of education and human development in collaboration with the Kennedy Krieger Institute/Johns Hopkins School of Medicine rule the Specific Reading Comprehension Deficits or S-RCD to be one such disability that is unknown to many people but is common among children. A child with this disorder can read and articulate sounds of words properly but has problem comprehending what he reads.
"S-RCD is like this: I can read Spanish, because I know what sounds the letters make and how the words are pronounced, but I couldn't tell you what the words actually mean," Laurie Cutting, Patricia and Rodes Hart Chair at Peabody, said in a press statement. "When a child is a good reader, it's assumed their comprehension is on track. But 3 to 10 percent of those children don't understand most of what they're reading. By the time the problem is recognized, often closer to third or fourth grade, the disorder is disrupting their learning process."
The functioning of the brain among children with this disability is quite different from that in children with dyslexia. Children with dyslexia show certain abnormalities in specific region of the occipital-temporal cortex, which is associated with recognizing letters and words. However, for children with S-RCD, the abnormalities lie in a region of the brain that is associated with memory.
"It may be that these individuals have a whole different neurobiological signature associated with how they read that is not efficient for supporting comprehension," Cutting concluded. "We want to understand the different systems that support reading and see which ones help different types of difficulties, and how we can target the cognitive systems that support those skills."
