
Reading begins as a visual process with the retina seeing letters and transferring that visual information to other areas of the brain for interpretation. But it’s unclear how the visual system contributes to reading disorders such as dyslexia.
That’s the aim of a new line of I-LABS research led by faculty researcher Jason Yeatman. Standard treatments for dyslexia target how individuals understand speech sounds, also called phonological processing. As of yet, there are no scientifically valid visual interventions that help dyslexia, but Yeatman said it is an active area of research with many possibilities.
“Dyslexia is a very heterogenous condition and there are multiple reasons why children might struggle,” said Yeatman, who also holds an assistant professor position in the UW Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences.
“One of the goals of my research is to understand individual differences among children with dyslexia. We are running experiments to try to understand the different factors that contribute to reading difficulties,” he said.
Yeatman recently wrote an article about the role of the visual system in dyslexia for a world leader in dyslexia resources, the International Dyslexia Association. His aim was to provide a balanced perspective on what the research on the visual system is revealing about children and adults with dyslexia.
“From a neuroscience perspective, reading requires signals to be rapidly communicated between regions of the cortex that are specialized for processing visual, auditory, and language information. An impairment in any one of these systems, or the bundles of wires (axons) that connect them, could cause reading difficulty,” Yeatman wrote in the IDA article.
As of right now, the interventions that work best target phonological processing skills—or how individuals hear a word, break it down into discrete sounds and then link those sounds to a greater meaning of a letter or letters that make up words.
But Yeatman believes that new, personalized treatment options for dyslexia could be revealed by better understanding individual differences in the reading disorder.
“Research studies clearly show that, in addition to phonological awareness deficits, the visual system functions differently in some children and adults with dyslexia, but there is much more work to be done to understand how those differences relate to the other impairments in dyslexia,” he said.
Read Yeatman’s article published by the IDA »
Learn more about Yeatman’s research in I-LABS story »