Tracy Packiam Alloway, PhD

Individuals with dyslexia often have difficulty in understanding the sound structures of words. In particular, they struggle in a skill known as segmentation and blending: breaking up words into smaller segments (e.g., c from –at) and putting them together. This skill is tested using ‘spoonerisms’. Try some yourself—exchange the first letter in each word.

Fat Dog  = Dat Fog

Here are some more, see how quickly you can do them (answers are below)

•    Cat flap
•    Bad salad
•    Soap in your hole
•    Mean as custard
•    Plaster man
•    Flock of bats
•    Chewing the doors

Why do children with dyslexia struggle? One explanation is that they have poor working memory so they struggle to hold all the sound segments in their head while they are doing the spoonerism task. Someone with dyslexia described it like this: “If I can’t see the word, I really struggle. I have to picture it before I can read it“.  The process of keeping two words active in our mental post-it-note, combined with trying to exchange the first letter proves much too difficult for most dyslexics.

So much of language learning relies on working memory. When we learn new words, we have to remember each sound segment, put it together, learn the meaning, and finally remember what it looks like for future use! Someone with poor working memory, like the person with dyslexia, struggles because they simply don’t have a big enough mental post-it-note (working memory) to cope with all these steps.

ANSWERS: Flat cap; Sad ballad; Hope in your soul; Keen as mustard; Master plan; Block of flats; Doing the chores

Dyslexia is a learning disability that mainly affects reading and spelling. Common features of dyslexia include spelling errors (‘nock’ for ‘knock’; ‘jerney’ for ‘journey’); mixing upper and lowercase letters in writing (for example: ‘numBers’), and confusing letters like ‘b’ and ‘d’.

Individuals with dyslexia also have poor working memory. They take much longer to process information, particularly in reading where they have to connect letter patterns with associated wounds. As a result, they often mix up longer words. One lady described herself as trying to remember ‘risk management report’ for her meeting. As she walked by the office kitchen, the fridge caught her eye and she ended up saying ‘fridge management report’ instead.

They also take much longer to articulate or say information, which means that they easily forget words, especially in conversations. For example, they might say ‘winimum wage’ instead of ‘minimum wage’.

This is hardly surprising as one view of dyslexia is that it is caused by poor working memory. We use our working memory to connect letters with the correct sounds, put them together to form a word, keep that word in mind while we read the next word, string all those words together to form a sentence, and then figure out the meaning of all those words. It’s no wonder that if someone has poor working memory, this can lead to dyslexia. Without good working memory, it is very difficult to perform well in reading and spelling.