ABSTRACT
Descriptions of children who would now be called ‘dyslexic’ go back almost 100 years. Those who have written on the subject include Morgan (1896), Hinshelwood (1917), Orton (1937), MacMeeken (1939), Hallgren (1950), Hermann (1959), Critchley (1970), Naidoo (1972), Critchley and Critchley (1978), Vellutino (1979), Miles (1983, 1987), Thomson (1984), Snowling (1987), Kamhi and Catts (1989) and Miles and Miles (1990). Some of the more important indications of dyslexia include lateness in learning to read, relatively weak spelling even after many hours of tuition, weak memory for disconnected items in series, such as the months of the year or visually or auditorily presented digits, and uncertainty over left and right. Above all, the teacher or parent is left with a sense of incongruity: despite their literacy problems dyslexies may show considerable ability in certain areas, for instance in the recognizing of logical relationships, in art and modelling, and in mechanical and engineering tasks. Dyslexia can usefully be described as a ‘syndrome’—that is, a pattern of signs which regularly go together: any one of these signs on its own would be of no special significance, but if several of them co-occur in the same individual they take on a meaning which none of them would have had in isolation.
