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by in_a_hole 185 days ago
> "Contrary to popular belief, the core problem in dyslexia is not reversing letters (although it can be an indicator),” she writes. The difficulty lies in identifying the discrete units of sound that make up words and “matching those individual sounds to the letters and combinations of letters in order to read and spell.”

The more I hear about dyslexia the more it sounds like the result of not being taught to read properly rather than any kind of neurological issue.
3 comments
reliablereason 185 days ago
Well it is largely genetic, but it could still be behaviourally linked for sure.

As i see it the fundamental issue in dyslexia has to do with tokenization and embedding.

The dyslexic brain uses a embedding space that is not very fit for purpose.

Some stuff that is dissimilar get embedded close to each other and some things that should be far from each other gets embedded close to each other.

Downstream networks that try to use these embeddings has a hard time trying to counteract the bad embeddings. The final result is a dyslexic person.

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tomcam 185 days ago
Not sure I agree? I made some famously (in my family) weird mistakes in writing when I was young. They were obvious dyslectic issues. Mostly that changed because I haven't shown any traits for years in reading & writing. I had an amazing teacher for reading (my mom, who was a teacher).

OTOH while I was educated in music for a long time, I have some kind of problem reading music that disappears when it's projected on a big screen. Yes, I have corrected vision. If I had been smarter I would have just memorized everything I played, which is what I have to do now because projecting music isn't too practical ATM.

So while I think for some people it's intrinsic, I think you're onto something. Never actually considered it as a cause.

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IAmBroom 184 days ago
Which led to it being misdiagnosed as a failure on the student's part, or of their past teachers.

Much as many autistic children having meltdowns are often viewed as being "ill-behaved", or that their parents don't discipline them enough/correctly.

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