Can Native Reading
Prevent Dyslexia?
Dyslexia is often given as the reason for why some children are late readers. I believe that,
for many cases of dyslexia, this belief may be precisely backwards. To put this idea as clearly
as possible:

           I believe that many children are dyslexic because they are late readers.

That is, I believe dyslexia is often an effect of late reading, rather than the cause of it.
    I suspect that this will be a controversial idea for some people. As someone trained as a
scientist, I also readily admit that this idea is only a hypothesis, and a speculative one at that. But
remember that every good idea starts out as speculation (as do bad ideas, to be sure). Because
I find the logic supporting the idea that late reading may lead to dyslexia so compelling, I felt I
had to devote a separate chapter to it in this book. Many common features of dyslexia are
explained by this idea: including the particular language difficulties many dyslexics have and
which children are most likely to suffer from it. And if the hypothesis is true, even if for just
some fraction of cases of dyslexia, it further implies that:

           Learning to read natively, at an earlier age than is considered normal
          today, may prevent many cases of dyslexia.

Obviously, the possibility that a simple change in the way we teach children to read may prevent
a frustrating and, in some cases, debilitating learning disability is potentially very important.
Especially when that same change—teaching children to read natively—is also beneficial for
children who are not likely to suffer from dyslexia even with current practices. There is no
downside at all.
I also believe this developmental explanation of the origin of dyslexia helps explain the way that
dyslexia is, in many ways, a smart disease, in a very deep sense of the word. And this helps
account for the fact that, frequently, people who are dyslexic are also extremely intelligent.
    I have a personal interest in this aspect of dyslexia because, though I am not myself dyslexic,
I had a roommate in college who was. In fact, it was this friendship that first got me to think
about reading in a fundamental way. In general, reading for me was something that came fairly
easily, but, for my roommate, writing and reading were a frustrating agony. Yet, he was so
eloquent in conversation, even on the sort of abstract and difficult topics that would challenge
many perfectly-fluent readers. It was also fascinating because, while writing a paper for an
English class was a slow and agonizing task for him, in the more stylized and simplified language
of computer programming my roommate was a virtual genius. It was because of the contrast to
my roommate’s experience that I first appreciated—or even noticed, really—my own relative
ease and facility with reading. I first began to think critically about cognitive aspects of reading.
    At this same time, I was also studying topics like logic, computer science, evolutionary
biology, and neuroscience; so I had some interesting and important tools with which to think
about reading. But even more illuminating was the fact that I also began taking French in
college. French was a language I had never studied before. My lack of concentration and my
halting comprehension in this new language struck me as very similar to my roommate’s
struggles in written English. I had a running joke that, in French, I was dyslexic. It wasn’t much
more than an observation and a joke at the time, but I now feel, in light of the theory of native
reading, that the joke might have contained a very important truth.
    To see this, it is important to remember that the spoken and written forms of a language are
deeply related; they are just two different forms of the same language, after all, and they have
almost entirely analogous regularities and analogous quirks. But the analogy is not exact. There
are some features of the written language that have no analogue in the spoken language at all.
Even where the correspondence is fairly close, there still remain particular aspects that are only
found in the written form of a language. And it is precisely these novel features of written
language—rather than the arguably hardest parts of language—which are some of
the most common stumbling blocks for dyslexics.
     Many dyslexics, in fact, are perfectly adept at the harder aspects of language. They can do
as well as anybody at such complex tasks as properly conjugating irregular verbs and correctly
using complex syntactical forms. In contrast, distinguishing a “d” from a “b”, a fundamentally
simple task, can be bafflingly difficult. There is real irony, even tragedy, in the struggle that
dyslexics have in distinguishing a “d” from a “b”: while this is a struggle that often makes them
feel dumb, I believe that the core of the problem is that they are, develop-mentally speaking,
already too smart when they learn these quirks of reading and writing. The problem is not the
complexity of the task, the problem is that they are already masters of spoken language by the
time they encounter writing. Their brains do not expect to have low-level novelties of language
introduced at this point in their development. At this point they are already concerned with
meaning and nuance in language, with telling stories and conversing with their friends, with
furthering their already well-developed social interests by using language; these are all very
smart and complex tasks.
    In contrast, the simple difference between a “d” and a “b” is a new quirk of the written form
of language. You see, these two letters are mirror images of each other, something with no real
analogy in spoken language. And, moreover, mirror symmetry is something that a five-year-old
has already learned to regard, at an almost instinctive level, as usually meaningless. Your best
friend facing to the right and your best friend facing to the left is still your best friend, a door that
opens to the right and a door that opens to the left is still just a door; we generally don’t even
notice such mirror-symmetric differences. In fact, it is useful and smart to learn to ignore them,
to learn to not even see them, which is what our brains generally do. But, then, long after this
useful cognitive strategy has been acquired, a child is confronted by written language where,
suddenly, “d” and “b” have entirely different meanings, and “dog” and “bog” are two entirely
different words.
    Many other aspects of written English which are particular difficulties for many dyslexics are,
similarly, other symmetries or near-symmetries of letters: for example, “p” and “q”, another
mirror symmetry; “u” and “n”, a case of rotational symmetry; and “n” and “m” or “v” and “w”,
which display a variant of another type of symmetry usually called translational or iterative
symmetry. Dyslexics also often have problems with the proper usage of capital and lowercase
letters, and with silent letters and other idiosyncrasies of spelling (like the way “c” and “s” can
make the same sound, but so can “c” and “k”).
    What unites all these problems is not that they are particularly hard problems, what unites
them is that they are problems that have no analogy in the spoken language. They are problems
at a basic, building-block level of language—a level that, in the spoken language, five-year-olds
have already mastered. They have been masters of this fundamental level of speech for many
years, in fact. But, with the typical late introduction of reading, most children find themselves, at
the age of five or six, suddenly and unexpectedly confronting these low-level complexities of
written language. Often, children at this age are also, developmentally speaking, appropriately
uninterested: as they are already masters of low-level spoken language and of low-level visual
interpretation, a continued interest in these subjects would be superfluous. Therefore, when the
artificial technology of writing is introduced at this late stage of cognitive development, it’s
perfectly natural that children are often easily frustrated by it. It is deeply unnatural to be forced
to concentrate on such low-level tasks of perception at this point in childhood. At five years old,
children are long past the age of babbling, they already have large vocabularies, and some of
their delight in the rhyming absurdities of Dr. Seuss may already be fading. Rather, they want
stories with meaning and social nuance; they are busy forging relationships with peers. At this
age they are also usually in the challenging and interesting new environment of school. Children
in school are, therefore, understandably frustrated to find themselves being grilled on the quirky
mechanics of the lowest level of written English—they are, after all, already fully fluent in spoken
English.
    But why do some children become dyslexic and others not? Under current educational
practices, most children eventually adequately get the hang of the new quirks of written
language. Children often do go through a stage where they occasionally reverse letters, struggle
with capitalization, and make other “dyslexic-like” mistakes. It can be quite a struggle indeed to
learn to read—and comprehension especially can remain marginal for many children—but, still,
it is only a minority of children that end up categorized as dyslexic. This is actually exactly what
you would expect, given the natural genetic and environmental variation among individuals.
Children certainly vary, both in the timing of their optimal window for language acquisition, and
in the length and shape of this developmental window of best opportunity. Children’s
environments also differ in subtle ways. For example, children who have merely heard a foreign
language consistently during infancy, even though they didn’t actually learn to speak it at the
time, can often learn it more easily when they study it later in life. In particular, they are often
better able to speak this language without any discernible accent, compared to people who
were never exposed to the language as infants. Similarly, I believe that part of the reason
parental literacy is important, and much of why it accurately predicts a child’s success reading in
school, is because children with literate parents generally have had at least some exposure to
letters and words from an early age (although their environment is only rarely correlated enough
to allow them to read natively and spontaneously before school).
    At the time they start school, children certainly vary in their neural flexibility for tasks such as
learning low-level aspects of language processing, and of visual processing, too. With non-
native-reading practices, what children actually need to do is particularly difficult: they need to
unlearn much of what they already know about language and cognitively retrain themselves at a
low neurological level in order to acquire the fundamentals of the written word. Currently, many
children are first consistently introduced to written language as late as five years of age, or even
later. Those children who retain sufficient cognitive flexibility at this age—even though it’s far
less flexibility than they had a few years earlier—these children end up reading “normally”.
(Although reading “normally” entails much more struggle, and deficits in comprehension, when
compared to children who learned to read more natively when they were younger.) But children
who, unfortunately, do not retain sufficient neural flexibility at five years of age are labeled
“dyslexic”. At best these children often remain baffled and frustrated by the written word for
many years. At worst, they continue to have considerable difficulty reading and writing for the
rest of their lives.
    This is the native-reading theory of dyslexia. If many cases of dyslexia are indeed caused by
introducing reading too late, an obvious possibility presents itself: many cases of dyslexia might
be easily and automatically prevented if only children were taught to read natively. Nearly all
children naturally master the essentials of spoken language before they are three years old.
Native reading says this is also the time when children are best able to master the fundamentals
of written language. They just need to be given the proper correlative environment that the
native-reading techniques provide. They need an environment where the relationship of spoken
and written language is clear and intuitive for a child, as it is in a native-reading home. In this
way, rather than struggling with the quirks of reading and writing throughout their life, native
readers instead have a deep, low-level feel for language, both spoken and written. Long before
school, native readers gain an almost visceral fluency for language in all of its forms, and they
will enjoy this advantage for the rest of their lives...
Copyright © 2008 Timothy D. Kailing. All rights reserved
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