What do we know about dyslexia?

Developmental dyslexia-children's failures to acquire reading skills that would be expected based on age and/or IQ-has been the focus of intensive study at various levels: behavior, brain, genetics.  My own research has mainly focused on using computational models to understand causal effects of one or another type of underlying anomaly.  Despite significant advances in understanding the condition, it is still a messy area with controversies focused on issues such as (a) whether dyslexia exists, i.e., whether it is a distinct condition or just the term for the lower end of a normal distribution of reading skill; and (b) the causes of the condition, about which there are many competing proposals, not all of which can be true. There is also (c) the extent to which evidence from neuroimaging and related methods can provide a way to identify dyslexics early and target remediations to particular underlying deficits, and more generally, the promise and perils of "neuroeducation."

In this talk, I'd like to provide a brief overview of what seems to be the state of play with regard to such issues, with the goal of engaging in some group assessment of the status various proposals about the underlying causes, and whether and how they might be reconciled. I would also like to broach whether it would be useful to update our models of reading acquisition and dyslexia to incorporate more of what has been learned about neuroanatomical variation and how it interacts with experience (e.g., instruction, spoken language variability).  Such models might also make some current controversies such as whether dyslexics have impaired phonological representations or intact representations but impaired access to them disappear.

Speaker Bio: Mark S. Seidenberg is Hilldale and Donald O. Hebb Professor in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has conducted research on many topics related to reading and language since the disco era. His reading research addresses the nature of skilled reading, how children learn to read, dyslexia, and the brain bases of reading, using the tools of modern cognitive neuroscience: behavioral experiments, computational models, and neuroimaging. His current research focuses on the causes of chronically low reading performance among poor and minority children, particularly the effects of language background on learning to read. He is among the most highly cited researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. His book Reading Matters will be published by Basic Books (late 2015).