Orton and Gillingham

Breakthrough In Research

A key scientist who carried out prolonged research into dyslexia was a man called Samuel T. Orton, who worked as a neurologist and who concentrated his activity caring primarily for stroke victims. In 1925 Orton met a young boy who could not read and who exhibited symptoms similar to stroke victims who had lost the ability to read. This interested Orton and he calculated that there was a condition totally unrelated to brain damage that made learning to read difficult. Orton called the condition strephosymbolia which he used to describe his theory that individuals with dyslexia had difficulty associating the spoken forms of words with their visualisation. Orton noted that reading problems in dyslexia did not appear to stem from basic visual deficits. He declared that the condition was caused by a complete failure to create hemispheric dominance in the brain. This is known as the balance between the left and right portions of the brain. He also believed that the children he worked with were disproportionately left or mixed handed.

Orton's theory concerning hemispheric specialization was borne out by later research establishing that the left planum temporale which is a brain area associated with language processing, is physically larger than the corresponding right area in the brains of non-dyslexic subjects, but that these brain areas are symmetrical or slightly larger on the right for dyslexic subjects. Studies that took place early in the 21st Century provide further demonstrable evidence, suggesting by demonstration that increases in a persons age and their basic reading level are associated with a suppression of right hemispheric activity. Orton later worked with psychologist and educator Anna Gillingham to create an educational intervention that pioneered the use of simultaneous multisensory instruction. The Orton-Gillingham method to remedial reading instruction is still widely used and forms the basis of many reading intervention programs today.

In the 1970s it was suggested that dyslexia arises from a deficit in phonological processing or difficulty in recognizing that spoken words are formed by visualisations. As a result, affected individuals have difficulty associating these sounds with the visual letters that make up written words as the sounds are different to the actual word itself. The advent of neuroimaging which enables doctors to look at brain structure and how the brain functions boosted the research in the latter part of the twentieth Century. Since then, interest in neurologicalcauses has persisted with current models studying the relation between the brain and dyslexia. More recently, geneticists have demonstrated increasing evidence that dyslexia is genetic. Scientists are searching for a link between the genetic evidence and the neurological evidence. They hope to compare this exactly with the symptoms demonstrated within the reading disorder. There are many theories about dyslexia, but the one that has the most support from scientific research is that, irrespective of the biological background, dyslexia is a condition of reduced phonogical awareness which is the ability to analyze and link the spoken and written language.