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Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties

https://phys.org/news/2026-05-years-struggles-obvious-massive-analysis.html
9•wglb•2d ago

Comments

wglb•2d ago
Dr. Daniel Hajovsky, associate professor in Texas A&M University's Department of Educational Psychology published study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40863201/
gus_massa•1d ago
It would be nice to replicate in other languages. In Spanish and German, reading is almost phonetic, unlike English.

Anyway, from my experience with my daughter, the step from single letters to silabes is difficult.

taeric•51m ago
"Reading is almost phonetic" is a largely meaningless phrase. There are some orthographies that are more regular than others. But, indeed, the very confusion people love to talk about with English only works if it is phonetic, but ambiguous.

And just solving for one form of ambiguity does not, necessarily, help. Consider contronyms. Words that are literally their own opposites.

I'm convinced the main thing lost in getting kids to read, is that too many mistake interaction with the words as automatic. It isn't. Taking apart a word symbol by symbol and putting it back together in a different form is the entire point of teaching how to read. And if you don't teach kids to do that with words, are you surprised when they can't do it with equations?

tuukkah•35m ago
I think you misunderstand. In a largely phonetic language, almost everyone learns to read in one school semester, after which it's a fully solved problem - no spelling bees or anything. Peculiarly, you don't need spelling bees either when learning English later. ("Contronyms" and "words" are orthogonal to reading as they apply to spoken language too (and it's very much automatic).)
btreesOfSpring•33m ago
There is a reason why German kids don't have spelling bees.
tuukkah•44m ago
You should think "the step from single sounds to syllables", and the way to do that is to begin with the easy syllables like "tu", "mi", "el" (not unlike the multiplication or addition tables) before moving to longer ones. [And note that M alone is not "em", it has to be "m" when learning to read - a common pedagogical mistake!] At least that's how children are taught in Finnish schools, and almost everyone learns to read during the first school semester. Also, one simple and efficient protection against dyslexia is to play the Graphogame (or similar) to get a lot of repetition with the sound-letter correspondences while learning to read.
jacknews•1h ago
'an'?

Is bad grammar one of the reasons, even though the title suggests there is just one?

econ•53m ago
[Not an expert] I met someone once who got very expensive glasses with some carefully calibrated prism to perfectly align both eyes. Like when you are exhausted you get double vision. His eyes were fine but with the glasses he could read all day as opposed to only a few hours. He only used them when his eyes started to tire. He said that anyone could have them made but was very curious how many poor readers could benefit as his tired eyes just felt like not wanting to read anymore.
Mordisquitos•24m ago
In fact, I find your very comment as an example of the variety of visual experiences that exist that I hadn't even thought of. I mean when you say “Like when you are exhausted you get double vision” that itself sounds alien to me. I have been exhausted many times but never associated it with seeing double. I have only experienced involuntary double vision in certain circumstances during my recovery from a severe TBI.
JMKH42•3m ago
In my mid forties now reading without good reading glasses is absolutely awful, I could see some people struggling with enjoyment of reading if they weren't aware their eyesight is an issue.

Something to check if you are getting older and not enjoying reading as much lately!

suddenlybananas•16m ago
This has been the mainstream understanding of dyslexia since the 1990s.

"Since the 1990s, the phonological deficit hypothesis has been the dominant explanation favored by researchers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_deficit_hypothesi...

zerof1l•16m ago
It would be interesting to see a study comparing languages where writing encodes sounds like English versus languages where writing encodes meaning, like Chinese. And also how a person’s visual and auditory capabilities relate to reading. Because languages like English need both I think.

I’m learning Japanese, and I’ve started learning Chinese characters, both their meanings and how to read them. Reading them feels different than English... I have a hypothesis that our brains work differently when processing symbols that encode meanings as opposed to just sounds. English requires an extra step, where characters are translated into sounds and then into words.

With Chinese characters, you are immediately looking at the meaning; you don’t need translation into sounds. This feels like a more efficient process cognitively to me, even though I have to memorize to recognize more characters.

JMKH42•9m ago
The article is strange, as it starts with "we used to think it was just that smart kids read well, but this new study etc etc"

But the details of the new study seem to support exactly that original idea.

Perhaps a little more detail on why and what kinds of smart, but it was a pretty broad set of mental skills that mattered

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