QUESTION: So much is being talked about ‘dyslexia’ and the associated ‘reading difficulties’ of children. Is there any connection with ‘reading’ with wrong eye movements of some children that makes it difficult for them to read?
ANSWER: Mr Simon Liversedge, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Southampton has done several experiments on this and has said: “In order to fully understand what is going wrong with people with reading difficulties, we first need to understand what is involved in normal language comprehension.’
Mr Michael Kahn reports in Reuters that when we read, our eyes lock on to different letters in the same word instead of scanning a page smoothly from left to right as previously thought.
Mr Liversedge further says that, “Using sophisticated eye tracking equipment, the team looked at letters within a word and found that people combined parts of a word that were on average of two letters apart.”
This finding could be useful for special educators dealing with dyslexic children.
