30 Oct The Dyslexia Reading Test, Explained

The dyslexia reading test includes two main parts. The first part analyzes the child’s underlying strengths and weaknesses in a variety of neuropsychological areas that can impact reading. The second part specifically targets their reading skills and looks at where the deficits are in their reading ability.

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Part One: Analyzing strengths and weaknesses

As dyslexia can be caused by a variety of deficits, it’s necessary for a full evaluation to look at where a child’s cognitive skills are lacking and how that deficit impacts their reading.

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For example, one child may have a deficit in their working memory and struggles to keep information in their mind as well as use it accurately. This impacts reading performance in a number of ways. For basic reading decoding, a child needs to keep in mind the sound symbol correspondence as they are processing individual letters, morphemes, phonemes, or whole words.

Deficits in working memory can cause mistakes in the processing of sounds as well as meaning for these basic building blocks of language.

In addition, a deficit in working memory can interfere with higher level reading skills. Even if a child can decode individual words properly, a working memory deficit can cause them to struggle to put the pieces of the sentence together and extract the underlying meaning.

Alternatively, a child may have well-developed working memory, but struggles with long-term retrieval. With this type of deficit, a child can keep information in mind as they are working, but it is difficult for them to recall information and use it fluently. In yet another possible scenario, a child may have phonological deficits which impact their underlying reading ability.

Due to the many possible areas that may be impacted in a child who has difficulty with reading, it’s important to have every domain assessed so that an accurate cognitive profile can be established.

Part Two: Evaluating the child’s reading performance

The second part of a dyslexia evaluation includes evaluating the child’s actual reading performance. There are many children with deficits in a related neuropsychological area who can nevertheless read well as they have been able to supplement the deficit with a particular strength.

As a result, it’s necessary for the evaluation to specifically identify what areas of the reading process are deficient, such as the phonological, orthographic, syntactical, and semantic parts of reading.