History And Early Researches Of Dyslexia
It’s been more than a hundred years since the ideas of Dyslexia and Word Blindness appeared. Over this time these ideas have slowly evolved into our modern understanding of dyslexia. Even though our modern understanding of dyslexia is still somewhat incomplete and vague, it has developed quite a bit from the days of it being primarily known as word blindness. The current American definition of dyslexia, since 1994 is, “Dyslexia is one of several distinct learning disabilities, It is a specific, language-based disorder of constitutional origin characterized by difficulties in single word decoding, usually reflecting insufficient phonological abilities”. This definition was decided on by the Orton Dyslexia Society Research Committee.
The committee's namesake Samuel Orton was one of the most important figures in the history of the study of dyslexia. Getting to our current understanding of dyslexia required both innovation in clinical scientific trials and in development of educational techniques for dyslexics. Samuel Orton’s work, with the help of Anna Gillingham, built on the work of his predecessors and propelled both of these forward. For this reason Orton’s work is among the most revolutionary in the field, despite being partially based on a flawed understanding of the disorder. In this paper I use the terms dyslexia and word blindness interchangeably. Please keep in mind that word blindness would have been the predominant term in the period that I am talking about. Dyslexia on the other hand was rarely used then but is now the proper term for the disorder. Word Blindness and Early Developments The first steps on the road to understanding dyslexia came in the late nineteenth century. During this period, and for half a century onward, the leading term for the disorder we now identify as dyslexia was “word blindness”. The name word blindness seems to imply that the disorder was of a visual nature. The name was influenced by popular early hypotheses of the cause of the disorder. Many early scientists, working in the field of word blindness, tended to believe that word blindness arose from a visual impairment, making words hard to read. Others such as William Broadbent and James Hinshelwood believed that word blindness could be more related to visual memory than vision itself. Today dyslexia is looked at as a phonological disorder rather than a visual disorder. The use of this misleading name shows that there was a fundamental lack of understanding of the disorder in the early days. It’s persistent use well into the twentieth century shows how slowly new found understandings of dyslexia spread.
Despite the names misleadingness, the jump from being an unobserved phenomena to a named disorder that was drawing the attention of researchers from various scientific fields throughout Europe and the United States was an important step to further understanding dyslexia. Probably the most famous early account of word blindness came in 1896, by Pringle Morgan. Morgan who was a pediatrician in England at the time recognized in his patient, Percy F, was a disorder that had yet to be properly defined in the medical community, Percy F… has always been a bright intelligent boy, quick at games, and in no way inferior to others his age. His great difficulty has been - and is now - his inability to learn how to read. This inability is so remarkable, and so pronounced, that I have no doubt it is due to some congenital defect. In spite of laborious and persistent training, he can only with difficult spell out words of one syllable. There were reports of congenital word blindness before Morgan’s, but none sparked interest in the subject the way Morgan’s account did. This was also one of if not the first case diagnosed in a child. Later on most dyslexia or word blindness studies focus on children as the disorder begins to be understood as a developmental disability. Morgan’s account was also more personal and sympathetic towards the patient, than most reports on the subject of the time This encouraged further understanding and interest. Morgan’s diagnosis in the account was informed by Adolph Kussmaul’s prior coinage of the terms “word blindness” and “word deafness”.
The idea behind these terms was that a person could be blind to text or deaf to words without while still having sufficient hearing, sight and intelligence. Morgan expanded on the idea by saying, “His visual memory for words is defective or absent”. Morgan realized that this word blindness was a defect of the brain rather than the eyes, but he does not fully move away from the idea of vision. This Idea of word blindness or dyslexia being an issue of visual memory stuck around and shaped many of Morgan and Kussmaul’s successors understandings of the disorder. James Hinshelwood, an eye surgeon from Scotland, further expanded upon the popular scientific understanding of word blindness. One of Hinshelwood’s more notable beliefs was that word blindness was more common than people thought at the time claiming, “Their rarity is, I think, accounted for by the fact that when they do occur they are not recognised”. At the time this was more of a prediction than a scientifically tested theory, but it proved to be very much correct. This prediction had a profound effect on the field as it was followed by an increase in recorded cases of word blindness and papers on the subject. Hinshelwood also noted that Dyslexia was sometimes hereditary, a notion which is still held as true today. Hinshelwood was an early believer in the possible effectiveness of specially educating children suffering from word blindness. Hinshelwood was very much influenced by Morgan’s studies. In fact Morgan’s study is what peaked Hinshelwood’s interest in the word blindness. Like Morgan Hinshelwood believed word blindness to be related to visual memory. T. R. Miles criticizes Hinshelwood’s work for, “still thinking in visuo-spatial terms”.
As an eye surgeon, Henshelwood was preoccupied by the visual aspect of reading and Morgan's Influence pointed him even further towards the visual memory hypothesis. Samuel Orton’s Research From the 1870’s up until World War I word blindness research was predominantly centered in Europe. From World War I to World War II word blindness research in Europe declined, especially in the United Kingdom. Perhaps in response to the gap or perhaps by coincidence in this period the United States of America’s first pioneer in the field emerged. Like the other early pioneers of the field, Orton drew upon his predecessors to build his initial understanding of the disorder then known as word blindness. Unlike Kussmaul Orton was not quick to accept the visual memory hypothesis. Instead, Orton rejected the term word blindness altogether, calling it misleading and saying, “There is no true blindness in the ordinary sense of the term nor, indeed, is there even blindness for words”. Orton observed that rather than being blind to some words dyslexics tended to distort the order of letters in words. Orton also noticded that sometimes dyslexics would mirror words and letters; confusing “b” and “d” for instance. Because of this he proposed the term “strephosymbolia”, which means twisting of symbols. This terminology never really gained any traction, as the term word blindness had already taken root and the two terms essentially had the same weakness in their assumptions of the disorder being visual in nature.
While Orton didn’t stray far from the visual aspect of dyslexia in his early hypothesis, it varied greatly from that of Morgan and Hinshelwood. Orton theorized that visual impressions of written words appear in both the dominant and non-dominant hemispheres of peoples brain, and that the image in the non-dominant hemisphere is flipped. He further theorized that word blindness was caused by neither hemisphere being clearly dominant over the other. He believed what he called unstable hemisphere dominance could cause the rearranging flipping and mirroring of letters. This hypothesis has been proven to be false and an oversimplification of how the human brain works, but his observations of the tendencies dyslexics are enough to make a pioneer of the field. Even though Orton’s overarching hypothesis was wrong, there was a lot to be learned from his work. The idea that dyslexics contort, rearrange and flip letters was a big step forward from the prior idea that word blind patients simply couldn’t recognise or see words. This idea also has attached itself to the popular understanding of dyslexia, because it is easier to imagine than non visual explanations. Like Hinshelwood, Orton believed that the disorder was often hereditary. Orton observed that dyslexics were often left handed or had a family history of left handedness. This link is still being explored today, but it is not believed to be related to Orton’s ideas of brain hemispheres. Orton also observed that transpositions and reversals could happen in spoken language, though this did not steer him away from thinking about the disorder visually. This discovery is nonetheless important to our modern understanding of dyslexia. Orton’s categorization of different kinds of reading and writing mistakes, such as distinctions between “kinetic” and “static” reversals, helped future researchers make deeper observations.
Developing Educational Techniques Hinshelwood firmly believed that children with word blindness could be helped through education and effort, “My long Experience of congenital word-blindness has enabled me to give with confidence a much more hopeful prognosis that in nearly all cases the children so affected with proper treatment and great perseverance can be taught to read”. The importance in this lie more in the precedent than the education itself. It was important because this was a pioneer of the field advocating education, when some people thought educating the word blind was a lost cause. The educational techniques he developed were somewhat flawed(at least in concept) because they were based on word blindness being a deficiency in visual memory. Hinshelwood’s educational techniques relied on stimulating other cerebral centers besides the visual memory center with the idea that the different centers leave impressions on eachother. Today this theory does not fit our understanding of dyslexia or the human brain. Despite the flawed basis some of Hinshelwood’s methods are still considered effective.
For instance he advocated the handling of wooden blocks, “the visual impressions were strengthened by the simultaneous associations with the tactile ones’s”. When tested by Hulme in 1981 this method proved effective aid for dyslexics who struggle to learn letters. It is important to note that this does not prove Hinshelwood’s hypothesis as there are lots of reasons this method might be effective. The biggest flaw with Hinshelwood’s education was that, because he focused so heavily on the visual aspect he failed to realize that many dyslexics have auditory language difficulties along with reading and writing difficulties. In general Hinshelwood’s multisensory approach has a lot of merit to it despite its dubious scientific basis. Following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Hinshelwood, Orton also prioritized education for the word blind. To help translate his new ideas on word blindness into remedial techniques, Orton enlisted Anna Gillingham, a research associate of his, and Bessie Stillman, a teacher friend of gillingham. The groups techniques were similar to Hinshelwood’s in that they also emphasized various sensory details of language, “how a letter or word looks, how it sounds and how the speech organs or the hand in writing feels when producing it”. Gillingham’s techniques using Orton’s study tried to create a “language triangle” by stressing the association of visual, kinesthetic and auditory elements of language. This idea builds not only on Gillingham’s methods but also on phonic teaching, which was fairly new at the time but would eventually become an important part of American reading education. Gillham’s procedure essentially meant drilling every aspect of a letter into the student.
When every aspect of every letter was memorized the student then began to read. Reading was to be done by building words from their sounds rather than memorizing the words. A routine for spelling was created known as Simultaneous Oral Spelling, which asks the student to spell a word while both writing and saying the letters out loud. Gillhams method, created in collaboration with Orton and Stillman, became a model for many programs in the United States and United Kingdom One of the key differences between Hinshelwood method and Gillhams, is that it acknowledges that some dyslexics struggle with the auditory aspect of language. Orton himself had observed this, but he never developed the idea. This is an important realization both in education and science. In an educational environment auditory difficulties can further exacerbate a dyslexic students other difficulties. Scientifically this realization is important as the disorder slowly begins to be recognised as a phonological disorder rather than a visual one. Conclusion Many of the early pioneers in the field of dyslexia and word blindness, based their work on flawed hypothesese and false conclusions.
