What is Dyseidetic Dyslexia?

Dyslexia may be simplistically defined as a sort of neurological disorder which impedes the acquisition and processing of language skills. Dyslexia can be found in varying degrees of severity and can present difficulties in understanding or speaking a language including phonological processing in reading, writing, spelling, handwriting and in extreme cases - also in arithmetic. Admittedly, dyslexia is a lifelong syndrome, but individuals with dyslexia quite often respond well to timely and appropriate intervention.

Literal Dyslexia: an individual facing difficulty in identification of letters, either unable to match sounds with the letters or unable to identify upper or lowercase letters.

Phonological Dyslexia: a person has difficulty with letters and connected sounds. They can read words that are familiar but have trouble reading unfamiliar words.

Neglect Dyslexia: a person neglects either side (letters to the left or right) of words - a problem particularly experienced in reading particularly words with too many characters.

Semantic Dyslexia: an individual distorting the meaning of a word or getting confused with the meaning that leads to incorrect reading.

Spelling Dyslexia: a person has problem reading any words and identifying individual letters.

Pure Dyslexia: a person having problem in reading only. There is no problem in writing.

Deep Dyslexia: a person has a problem in writing letters and words, grasping word-meanings, integrating the sounds of letters and in pronouncing less familiar words.

Note: Primarily dyslexia is of three types: Trauma, Deep and Developmental. Read more about them here. However, medical practitioners as well as people often classify dyslexia based on processing disorders. Other types of classifications are based on developmental reading approach. In this approach, dyslexia reading disorder is based on the concept of phonetics. Dyslexia falling under this category is more psychological in nature. Mainly there are three types of dyslexia: Dysphonetic, Dyseidetic and Dysphonetic/Dyseidetic.

Dysphonetic and Dyseidetic are two different types of dyslexia. In dysphonetic dyslexia, people face difficulty in connecting sound to symbols. Whereas, Dyseidetic pertains to people who though have a fairly good grasp of phonetics but experience difficulty with spelling and recognition of whole word.

If a child has difficulty in reading and/or spelling because he or she is unable to remember whole irregular sight words (also known as eidetic words) this condition is known as Dyseidetic Dyslexia. Someone with Dyseidetic Dyslexia does not face any problem in understanding phonics but s/he cannot recapitulate the nature of the word.

Persons with Dyseidetic Dyslexia can easily spell the words that are phonetic but will be at a loss reading or writing words that are non-phonetic such as: the, what or does. It is said that a straight phonics approach does not work well for children with Dyseidetic Dyslexia. In other words, phonics-based reading approach is not for the individuals with Dyseidetic Dyslexia. Dyseidetic Dyslexia is also called ‘Visual Dyslexia’ or ‘Surface Dyslexia’ because it’s all about viewing symbols and processing them effectively into written words.

There is strong evidence that Dyseidetic Dyslexia is genetic, and that it is passed down to each generation in varying degrees regardless of the gender of the child.

While there are many theories about how to treat Dyslexia, there is in fact no actual cure for it. The school has to develop a plan with the parent to cope up with the child's deficiency.