The Effects of Dyslexia on Word Recognition and Letter Order

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The Effects of Dyslexia on Word Recognition and Letter Order There are two main ways to teach a person to read one is phonics and the other is word recognition, which sometimes is referred to as whole word. Phonics is taught by connecting the spoken sounds a language to the letters that represent those sounds. Word recognition is about repetition and learning that a group of certain letters is a certain word (Schmidgall & Joseph, 2007). Word recognition is essentially learning that letters in a certain order make up a certain word. Although it has been proven that the human mind can rearrange words that are misspelled without even realizing and read a passage as if nothing is wrong (Wiseheart, Altmann, Park, & Lombardino, 2009). There have been however a few items that researchers have been in agreeance with regarding letter transposition. The first is that the first letter of the word is a primer and readers do best if it says in its correct position (Norris, Kinoshita, & Van Casteren, 2010). Reading speed decreases 36 percent when the first letter of the word is transposed (Rayner, White, Johnson, & Liversedge, 2006). Transpositions of middle letters are easier to understand than transpositions of ending letters, which in turn are easier to comprehend than transpositions of beginning letters. (Johnson, Perea, & Rayner, 2007). The other main thing that researchers agree on is that reading transposed words takes longer than reading correctly spelled words (Rayner, White, Johnson, & Liversedge, 2006). It can be easier to read and comprehend sentences is when the sentences are composed of a mixture of word length. If all of the words are long, the brain has to decode every word, which makes the brain work harder. If there are some smaller words mixed throughout the sentence; the brain has little breaks and therefore has to work less hard. The

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