Dyslexia in adults: common features and symptoms

A summary of the characteristics of dyslexia in adults, a relatively common disorder.

Specific learning disabilities make it difficult for affected children to cope with academic tasks, where they must learn to read, write and compute to meet the early challenges posed by the educational system.

Such childhood problems can have profound emotional consequences if they are not detected in time and are not intervened by a multidisciplinary team, and can continue into adulthood (but transforming as the demands change).

In this article we will address how dyslexia is expressed in adults, one of the most common diagnoses of dyslexia.one of the most frequent diagnoses in this category, and how it affects work or other relevant areas of their lives (family, friendships, etc.).

Dyslexia in adults

Dyslexia is a disorder that usually begins during childhood (developmental subtype), although it sometimes debuts later in life (acquired subtype) as a result of severe head injury or stroke. At the clinical level it is expressed as a difficulty limited to reading and/or writing (omission, addition or substitution of letters), although sometimes there are also problems in mathematical calculation (dyscalculia).

Three specific types of dyslexia have been identifiedDyslexia is characterized by phonological dyslexia (difficulty reading long, novel, infrequent or pseudowords), superficial dyslexia (good reading of pseudowords but with a tendency to make errors due to omission/substitution of letters and confusion of homophonic words) and profound dyslexia (impairment of the phonological and visual pathways, with errors in function words, semantic errors and problems in reading pseudowords).

The following are the main symptoms that can occur in adults with dyslexia, many of which are often an extension of those experienced during childhood (in developmental dyslexia). It is essential to keep in mind that in many cases, the diagnosis was not received in childhood..

1. Difficulties at work

One of the most common problems in adults with dyslexia is Difficulty in adapting to jobs that require a significant administrative burden.. There is an explicit preference for positions oriented towards manual/automated activities, as opposed to those requiring greater attention to multiple demands or the drafting of texts to meet the company's bureaucratic requirements.

It is for this reason that they often fear promotions in which responsibility may swing from one side to the other, since there is often a great distrust of their own abilities when these involve reading or composing texts. This situation can lead to the loss of opportunities for internal promotion, with which they would improve their quality of life and feel rewarded for their efforts in their career.

2. Self-esteem problems

Adults with dyslexia often have significant erosion of self-esteem associated with poor performance in a variety of tasks.This is accentuated in cases where a diagnosis was not received during childhood. This is because, when the problem has been detected early, errors are usually attributed to the learning disorder itself and not to other causes that could compromise the self-image (limited intelligence, laziness, etc.).

Some adults with dyslexia have had to endure ridicule from their peers for having difficulty reading or writing correctly, and there are even cases in which teachers have contributed to the decline in the perception they had of themselves and their ability as children (due to ignorance of the disorders that can affect learning ability). These experiences of shame, primitive because of the time of life in which they took place, may cause the adult to question his or her own ability to learn, may cause the adult to question his or her intelligence and grow up with insecurities that negatively that negatively shape their self-esteem.

The situation paves the way for mood and anxiety disorders, as has been consistently found in scientific studies on this end. These comorbidities, as we saw, are more common among adults with dyslexia who never received a diagnosis during childhood.

3. Reading Difficulty

Adults with dyslexia have difficulty reading, as they often report that the letters seem to "move or even vibrate", compromising the comprehension of more or less long texts (the person would "skip" a line or even repeat the one he/she has just read). All this is accentuated when the typography or color of the letters and words is alternated.. In fact, they tend to have a clear preference for sans serif typefaces (which use the most elementary strokes, without flourishes or ornaments).

The pace of reading is also altered, both "out loud" and mentally, so they require more time than the average person to study a document.They require more time than the average person to study a document. Clumsiness may appear during pronunciation, so that the syllables that form each word are excessively stressed (altering fluency) and punctuation marks are ignored or exaggerated. This is an erratic and forced reading, which requires the investment of so many resources that it limits the ability to remember what is read.

It is very common that the person must resort to rereading passages or paragraphs that he/she had previously reviewed; especially when they contain technical terms, neologisms, foreign words, polysyllables or infrequent words. All this means that it is particularly difficult to extract the main idea from any text of varying length, as well as to separate what is relevant from what is not. Writing a summary is often an intractable challenge for people with severe dyslexia.

A final difficulty often encountered in reading involves problems in knowing how to articulate the sound of certain letters according to grammatical rules. how to articulate the sound of certain letters according to grammatical rules.. For example, the letter "c" can be pronounced soft (parcel) or hard (rock), depending on the vowel it accompanies ("e" or "i" in the first case and "a", "o" or "u" in the second). There may be a difficulty in choosing the most appropriate sound automatically during reading.

4. Lack of reading habits

Most adults with dyslexia report significant reading difficulties, as this is the core symptom of the disorder. Many indicate that the problem dates back to the first years of life, even though it was not carried over to the early years of the child's life.Even though no diagnosis or evaluation has been carried out. That is why they were never able to consolidate a reading habit, preferring activities that could arise spontaneously and without so much conscious effort. That is, playful activities that did not represent a struggle against their own adversity.

Very rarely literature is a hobby of the dyslexic adult, who prefers short texts to long novels or novels with convoluted plots. This fact is not at all related to the ability to comprehend information, but is associated with the format of the text.Rather, it is associated with the format through which the information is recorded and accessed by the nervous system for further processing. The reception of the same data through auditory channels, or in the form of images, is remembered more accurately and for a longer period of time.

5. Problems in written communication

People with dyslexia have problems in writing, generally writing slowly and using handwriting that lacks aesthetic sense. Often there is confusion in the stroke of letters whose shape is very similar or has a specular relationship (such as "d" and "b" or "q" and "p"), which can also occur in reading (especially when they are shown in isolation and not as part of words). This slowness in writing makes writing texts perceived as a laborious or impossible task.

Adults with dyslexia may experience difficulties when copying at dictation, that is, when listening and writing simultaneously.. This phenomenon is due to the fact that language processing requires such a high volume of cognitive resources that divided attention cannot be managed when several stimuli of a verbal nature (writing, listening and/or reading at the same time and correctly) compete with each other. This phenomenon becomes evident in childhood, in dictation tasks that take place in the academic context.

Finally, spelling is also frequently affected (especially deaf letters or letters that sound similar when pronounced). Often in their written products one can detect the omission of words within sentences, or even letters within words, which makes them difficult to read and understand. It is common that, in the case that they have the need to write in the work environment, these errors motivate complaints from colleagues.

6. Difficulty in left/right discrimination

Many people with dyslexia, as adults, have difficulty identifying quickly (without much thought) which of the two sides of their body is the left and which is the right, or on which of these two sides an object is located with respect to a central point.

The symptom does not occur in all cases or with the same severity, nor is it exclusive to individuals.nor is it exclusive to people with dyslexia. Only in a very exceptional way can the sense of "up" and "down" be compromised, which happens in cases where spatial vision is profoundly altered (orientation, map comprehension, etc.).

Studies have also found that people with dyslexia tend to process verbal stimuli presented in the left half of their perceptual field more slowly than readers without dyslexia (approximately 15 milliseconds). All this suggests a hypofunction of the parietal lobe of the right hemisphere, since we must remember that the detection of stimuli in either hemifield is processed contralaterally.

7. Problems in oral communication

Most adults with dyslexia communicate verbally without difficulty, but there is a percentage of them who also have problems in this area. The most common are the delay in answering the questions they are asked (as if they think they are going to say too much time) and the reluctance to speak in public. (as if they think about what they are going to say for too long) and reluctance to speak in public.

The latter impairment is often the result of emotional conflict caused by teasing from peers at school when reading aloud.

Poetry recitation is especially difficult for adults with dyslexia, especially when it requires improvisationThey have trouble finding assonant or consonant rhymes. This is accentuated by the fact that the last syllables of words are the most difficult to pronounce correctly, but also the most relevant to give metrical sense to a poem.

The beauty of a verbal stimulus (which is the object of poetry) is relegated to a second order of importance in contrast to the formal aspects.

8. Sequential planning problems

Adults with dyslexia have trouble organizing information sequentially, that is, stringing together the fragments of verbal discourse in a serial fashion. Instead, they often make nonlinear judgments that look at the entire message, which contributes to the occurrence of unconventional mental processing strategiesThese have often been described in the literature as a potential strength of the dyslexic (creativity, divergent thinking or "out of the box" reasoning).

However, such difficulty in sequencing can have some negative consequences on daily life, namely: forgetting appointments (which is often part of what has come to be called prospective memory, but is really an executive function), problems in understanding several instructions at once (divided attention) and disorganization (since there is difficulty in prioritizing and prioritizing tasks).

9. Attentional problems

Attentional problems are common in adults with dyslexia, and are often are often referred to as an inability to maintain focus for a prolonged period of time or substantial distractibility..

It is also noted that irrelevant stimuli trap excessive attention, so that it becomes difficult to devote sustained effort to a message if it competes with many verbal stimuli at the same time (as for example in a cafeteria where many voices are heard around).

10. Predominance of visual skills

People with dyslexia may discover over time that they process verbal information better when they are able to structure it through diagrams or other resources that provide it with visual nuances, and that also evoke images more accurately than words. This makes it easier for them to remember others by their face than by their name, and makes it harder for them to learn concepts.and they find it difficult to learn new concepts.

Bibliographical references:

• Protopapas, A. and Parrila, L. (2018). Is Dyslexia a Brain Disorder? Brain Science, 8(4): 61.
• Hebert, M., Kearns, D.M., Baker, J., Bazis, P. and Cooper, S. (2018). Why Children With Dyslexia Struggle With Writing and How to Help Them. Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 49(4), 843-863.