Assessment of Reading
Overview
Show the patient a list of words and ask them to read the words out loud, or ask them to read a few sentences from a newspaper.
Causes of Disordered Reading
- Pure alexia - reading of words letter-by-letter.
- Surface dyslexia - ability to phonetically sound out words (breed, steam), but difficulty reading words with irregular spelling (debt, colonel, broad, steak).
- Phonological dyslexia - inability to read non-words (neg, bluck, deak) with otherwise normal reading of words.
- Deep dyslexia - semantic errors (e.g. reading the word 'table' as 'chair' or 'street' as 'road'), and inability to read plausible non-words (neg, bluck, deak).Stroke, traumatic brain injury
- Neglect dyslexia - the patient omits or substitutes part of a word, especially at the beginning of the word. For example, island / land or fish / dish.Dominant hemispheric damage
Note
- The term 'dyslexia' is colloquially used to denote 'developmental dyslexia', which is a global difficulty in reading beginning in childhood that may progress to adulthood. The dyslexias identified above are specific defects that are generally acquired rather than developmental.
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