Remembering New Words . . . or Not!!
February 21, 2019
If you have a child who is having difficulty learning to read, you’ll easily recognize this frustration!
Your child has successfully (although perhaps slowly) read a new word. Then on the next day, or on the next page, or even the next sentence, it is as though they are seeing it for the first time. Every single day, for weeks! Even more frustrating, it isn’t consistent. They may go for several days able to read the word with some degree of familiarity, then all of a sudden they don’t know it anymore. Sometimes it is because something happens, they get sick, you have a lot going on and don’t read together for a day or two, the routine changes, or your child is upset about something. Sometimes it happens for no reason at all but all of a sudden you’re back to the beginning again. What is going on?
My first thought was that they just weren’t trying. After all, how can a child who can tell me every detail about XYZ, and obviously can remember things in great detail, how are they unable to recognize a simple two or three letter word after seeing and reading it a few times. Just being lazy! Not focusing! Not trying! None of these.
A former teacher with a lot of experience with dyslexia once told me that if it takes a non-dyslexic child 10 – 30 repetitions to remember a new sound or word, it will take a child with dyslexia about ten times the repetition to reach the same level of skill…which means 100 – 300 repetitions!! I didn’t believe her, until I experienced it for myself with my children. Finally, scientific research has discovered why this is the case, and there is a real physical cause in the brain as to why it takes them longer to remember new material.
According to an article published in the scientific journal Neuron, adults and children with dyslexia have reduced neurophysiological adaptation. What does this mean? When a person experiences something new, for example listening to a person speak that you haven’t heard speak before, initially the part of your brain that handles auditory processing shows more activation. It needs to work harder to understand the speech than when listening to someone you’ve heard speak before. The more you listen to the new speaker, the less activation your auditory processing will show. Your brain has adapted to the new speaker’s voice resulting in faster and more accurate processing of the information. This adaptation of the brain can be measured by fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) which detects changes associated with blood flow. The harder an area of the brain is working, the more blood flow required to that area. This study demonstrated that people with dyslexia showed significantly less adaptation to speech, words, objects, and faces than people without dyslexia. It also found that the ability to adapt was correlated to reading ability. Within the group of people with dyslexia, those whose brains adapted faster had better reading abilities than those whose brains adapted more slowly.
The best analogy I’ve heard for understanding adaptation and brain connections is this: think of an idea moving through your brain cells. Each idea follows its own particular path. The more times a particular path is followed, the more ingrained that path becomes and the more likely it is that your brain will follow that path again. Just like walking through a field of tall grass is easier if you follow the same path each time, until you finally create a trail with no grass on it. That path is adaptation, allowing you to walk across the field much faster and with much less effort than breaking a new trail through the grass every time. However, for people with dyslexia, for some reason we don’t yet understand, every time they start across the field they have to break a new path as though they hadn’t crossed it before. The longer it takes for their brain to begin to create a path, the more likely they will have a lower their reading ability. This explains why your child acts as though they’ve never seen a word or sound before, even after you’ve been working on it for days. As far as their brain knows, it hasn’t seen that word before. It is a new experience every time!
Your child is not being lazy. Their brain literally is doing something new every single time, until finally a path begins to form. Slowly at first, then more consistently. New experiences require a lot more energy and effort, so they will find reading exhausting. This is why it is so important to keep reading sessions short, so as to not tire them out. Setbacks (illness etc.) can literally take you back to the beginning again. Be patient! They are not doing it to annoy you. They are just as frustrated as you are because they know they should remember something, but they have no idea what it is they should remember. Their brain will adapt at its own pace, and your job is to keep stimulating it in a positive and encouraging manner.
References
Perrachione et al., “Dysfunction of Rapid Neural Adaptation in Dyslexia”. Dec 2016; Neuron 92; 1383 – 1397; doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2016.11.020