GEO 9/2002
Thanks to new, customisable software, dyslexics should learn to read more easily.
They either read haltingly and incorrectly or fluently without understanding what they are reading: Around 10 per cent of primary school pupils in the German-speaking world lag well behind the class average in their reading ability. The diagnosis is often dyslexia.
However, according to neuropsychologist Reinhard Werth from the Institute of Social Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at the University of Munich, such reading difficulties are not irreversible. He has recently started treating his young patients with software that he developed together with the Munich-based company celeco. This not only enables him to identify the cause of the reading difficulties, but also to treat them in a targeted manner.
For a long time, dyslexia was considered to be a disorder of the relevant area of the brain. For Werth, however, “the reading process is a complex network that requires many individual tasks – from the image capture on the retina of the eye to its processing in the brain”. And a lot can go wrong along the way.
After all, human visual functions are not exactly ideal for reading. This is because optimum visual acuity is only achieved at a single point on the retina – at the fovea, which is around 1.5 millimetres in size. The eyes must therefore fixate the word to be read precisely in its centre area. However, if the image of the word on the retina is shifted by just a few millimetres due to misalignment of the eyes, it can no longer be read correctly. According to Werth, this could be one of the causes of dyslexia.
However, as Werth has observed, some children simply do not look correctly when reading. As a result, their gaze either misses the word or it is only looked at so briefly that its meaning cannot be grasped.
This is where Werth’s software can help: It trains pupils to fixate on each word segment long enough. Letters or word segments are shown on the monitor in periods of 100 to 500 milliseconds – depending on the child’s receptivity. If it takes too long to grasp words, this ability can be treated through training in which the time intervals are gradually shortened.
Others jump around too much while reading: the eyes skim over several letters of the word. For example, Thursday becomes Thursday. In this case, the software presents a text in which the word segment to be read is highlighted in colour. The highlighting jumps from one word segment to the next and thus determines the size of the eye jumps. To ensure that the reader is not distracted by the rest of the text when reading a word, this is only faintly visible.
Some patients, on the other hand, spell out every word. The programme then helps them to learn to combine the individual characters into a segment. To do this, words or word segments appear on the monitor for less than 250 milliseconds – a seven-year-old can easily recognise a word in this time. The short presentation time prevents the children from looking at letter by letter, forcing them to recognise whole words.
According to Reinhard Werth, the programme can be used individually – and “with the right motivation and about ten minutes of concentrated practice per day, reading skills can be significantly improved after less than three months”
Translated by celeco