Sound, not sight
If it is not letter reversal, then what is it? As mentioned earlier, it is a learning disability. Often children with dyslexia have weak phonemic awareness, or the ability to decode and spell words. It means they have trouble hearing the nuances among individual sounds, phonemes or language.
So, many children with dyslexia struggles with learning and remembering how sounds and letters go together – that’s about 5% of American children.
Others may report very different symptoms. Letters moving around the page is a common report.
Generally, they struggle despite adequate classroom instruction. They also find it difficult to identify printed words. It is a problem with the brain and not vision.
Yet it does not mean they are intellectually challenged. Many brilliant people, like Albert Einstein, are known to have dyslexia. This is seen in the fact that a formal diagnosis requires that a child’s overall intellectual ability be markedly superior to their reading ability.
Here’s something: An experiment by a professor from the University at Albany required his dyslexic and non-dyslexic American students to reproduce a string of Hebrew letters none of them were familiar with. Those with dyslexia did the task just as accurately as their non-dyslexic counterparts.