Test For Dyslexia

Adults, dyslexia and reading speed are intricately linked when looking for help for dyslexia. Dyslexia itself has been argued to be a lifelong condition but the nature of the reading deficit will change during the person’s lifespan. Although it may be harder to detect, dyslexia can still be diagnosed in adulthood.  A compensated dyslexic is usually a term used to describe a developmental dyslexic who may have compensated for their difficulties by developing other strategies. This is usually achieved by relying more heavily on skills that are either not affected or less so.

If you are a compensated dyslexic, you still have problems that are not always readily recognised either by you or anyone else. To you, how you process written words has become normal and I doubt you realise anything is wrong except that you may be a slow reader and have some difficulty in remembering what you have read and understanding it.

Perhaps when reading or spelling long words you break them down into smaller words that you already know and then join them together. That’s fine when it works! You may miss lines of text when copying and/or find storing new words in your memory hard.

It is perhaps more usual to look at that errors people make to diagnose dyslexia. However, with compensated dyslexics this may not differ that much from skilled readers. Several studies have now shown that compensated dyslexics can be revealed much more easily by looking at the time it takes to respond to tasks that involve recognising written words.

As mentioned, adults, dyslexia and reading speed are intricately linked when looking for help for dyslexia. It is only quite recently that psychologists have paid more attention to individual differences in skilled and less skilled readers. This includes looking at reading speeds as well as the errors made when diagnosing dyslexia. Individual differences are important as dyslexia has so many different facets that may, or may not appear in an individual.