Reading Disabilities

Neurological explanations of reading failure exist, such as a functional maturational lag, but for the most part educators have been unwilling to accept single cause explanations for the range of reading disabilities that are observed in the schools. For many years the work of Hinshelwood and of Orton was ignored by educators and educational psychologists. For example, neither Huey ( 1908), nor Wheat ( 1923), nor Anderson and Dearborn ( 1952) devoted a single line to dyslexia or word-blindness in their texts on the psychology of reading. Brooks ( 1926) provided a neutral, brief description, listing it as one of 13 causes of slow silent reading, along with defective vision, lack of interest, and so forth.

In parallel with objective, standardized tests came a concern for reading failure, for the students who in the past were simply considered slow or backward. Just as Binet and Henri developed intelligence tests to identify students who had potential for learning but were not progressing as expected in the French schools, diagnostic tests for reading were developed to determine what, if anything, might be done with disabled readers. Among the work done in the first four decades of this century on diagnosis of reading disabilities, the most influential was that of Gates and his colleagues at Teachers College, Columbia University . Gates, who had been a student of Thorndike at Columbia , published The Improvement of Reading: A Program of Diagnostic and Remedial Methods in 1927 and a revised edition in 1936.

Yet even with these reservations, it is difficult to ignore the enormous progress that was made prior to World War I in understanding visual processes in reading. That we still are trying to understand how printed words are recognized, and why particular letters are often confused, and whether certain reading disabilities have a neurological basis do not mean that little was accomplished prior to the present time. Many of the old problems are still with us, as the remaining chapters of this book demonstrate, but we stand on higher ground in attacking them, thanks to what has been learned in the past.

In earlier years, these errors were accorded considerable attention in the literature because they were thought to provide evidence that reading disabilities are caused by some type of visual perceptual deficit. More recently however, compelling arguments have been made that reversal errors have a linguistic rather than a visual origin, and that there is little or no evidence of visual processing deficits among the reading disabled.

Although there is still no general agreement among theoreticians and researchers about the cause or causes of reading disability, few if any present-day theorists would consider reversal errors as potential causes of reading disability. Some might, however, consider static reversals as reflecting more general deficits in basic visual processes. Because the older literature on reversal errors comes out of a largely obsolete view of the cause of reading disabilities, much of it is essentially irrelevant to current conceptualizations of reading disability. Certain aspects of the literature, however, remain significant to current debates about reading disability in that they have relevance to the potential role of visual processing deficits in causing reading disabilities.