It's Time for a Multiple Deficit View of Dyslexia

Because additional specific linguistic risk factors can contribute to reading difficulties, they should all be included as part of a comprehensive dyslexia evaluation. Warmington and Hulme (2012) explained that “the learning of mappings between orthography and phonology is critical for learning to read…, including the process of learning letter–sound correspondences and the learning of mappings at the level of single letters, letter groups, and whole words” (p. 47). [...]orthographic mapping involves first identifying the sequence of graphemes in a word and then mapping these letters onto their corresponding sequence of phonemes (Ehri, 2024). Wolf (1999) also noted that other factors could play a role, stating that, “The history of dyslexia research, the heterogeneity of our dyslexic children, and the very complexity of the reading process argue against any single-factor, two-factor, or even three-factor explanation” (p. 5). Dr. Martha Denckla, who helped establish the important role of RAN in predicting poor reading, described RAN as a way to measure the disruption in the “visual–verbal highway,” or the “see it-say-it circuit” (Mather & Sammons, 2005). [...]the speed between the eyes seeing a symbol and the mouth producing the name of the symbol is slow. Schneider and McGrew (2018) described working memory capacity as the “ability to manipulate information in primary memory” (p. 99) that requires both short-term storage and attentional control.