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Wake Forest School of Medicine Develops Simple
Test for DyslexiaTest for dyslexia using flashing lights
"We're not clinicians here but we try to sort of think outside the box," said Mark Wallace, an associate professor of neurobiology and anatomy. The experiment is simple. People sit down in front of a screen and a console with two keys. Two lights flash in quick succession while a subtle sound is conveyed through headphones. The subject pushes a button to indicate which light flashed first. The lights are flashed so quickly that people only get the correct answer 50 percent of the time when no sound is used. With the sound, performance improves. "You can discriminate lights more closely in time when you have the sound there," Wallace said. "We believe that somewhere in the brain this information is used sort of synergistically." The experiment showed a basic difference between the brains of people with dyslexia and those who don't have the condition. People who didn't have dyslexia had their performance improve when the sound occurred within 150 milliseconds of the light flashing. People with dyslexia had a much larger window for the sound and light. They did better if the time between the light and the sound was as long as 350 milliseconds - just a shade longer than it takes a major-league pitcher to fire a fastball over home plate. Wallace thinks that this difference could explain why dyslexics have trouble learning to read. A child who is dyslexic and learning to read by looking at the words as a parent reads to them may be pairing the wrong sounds with the words, Wallace said. "Early reading involves matching what you see with what you hear. But in dyslexics, we believe this matching process is disrupted. The sights and sounds of words are inappropriately matched. So, while the average person very quickly matches the written word 'dog' with the sound 'dog,' a child with dyslexia may have much more difficulty," Wallace said in a written statement. The study will help identify dyslexic children so that they can be taught in a way more suited to their way of thinking, Wallace said. And because the test doesn't include words, it can be used on very young children, said Lynn Flowers, a co-research and assistant professor of neuropsychology. "What's really neat about it is that they're not using any really lexical information. So there are no words involved, there are no letters matched with letter sounds. This is strictly a very basic auditory with visual task with very simple stimuli," Flowers said. "It's a possibility that something like this could be used with children even before they can talk at all.... The aim always is, besides that basic science one, is to identify people early enough so that you can prevent reading failure in school." Still, there are questions left to answer, Flowers said. "Why is that? That's the next question, of course," she said. Wallace and his team hope to do a study to answer that. "The next step for us is to look at the brains of these individuals when they're actually doing the test," he said. By Danielle Deaver With many thanks to the highly recommended Winston-Salem Journal.
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Researchers
at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine have come up with a simple
test that they think can identify dyslexics and help them find the right treatment.
