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    #212491 03/12/15 02:30 PM
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    I have a 6.5 year old son who just took the WISC-IV as a prerequisite for applying to a gifted school near us. He's shown a number of characteristics of being gifted ever since he was born. He is currently in Kindergarten in our local public school and has a summer birthday (he's one of the oldest in his class).

    My spouse, who started reading when she was 3, has often expressed to be that, given his very noticeable and precocious vocabulary, it's a little odd that he isn't reading "better." In the past, I've always just thought that he would learn on his own time and that it's something that could just unfold naturally (I was not an early reader, so I think I have a different perspective). Within the last month, he's starting to read fluently (probably on par with what they are teaching in a second-grade classroom) so he's maybe about a year ahead of average.

    The test results really surprised us in that he scored much higher than either my spouse and I were expecting (scores deleted)...

    Anyways, so both of us have been doing a prolific amount of reading about gifted education since we learned the test results. One of the articles I came across today describes something they termed stealth dyslexia. I'm sure I'm reading into this, and it sounds crazy to me to think that my child might fall into this category, but...

    • he occasionally writes letters backwards (though this is apparently somewhat common?)
    • he misspells words (such as 'sik' for 'sick')
    • he writes very slowly
    • he tells us that he reads faster in his head than he can out loud


    Are these things that will work themselves out as he gets older (i.e., how much of this is him simply being a typical kid learning to read)? Or should I try to get him assessed for stealth dyslexia, and if so, where in the world would I go to do this? I can't help but think I'd get laughed out of most psychologist's offices if I even asked the question.

    Thanks for your help in advance.

    Last edited by George C; 07/15/15 09:43 AM.
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    What did the rest of his WISC-IV profile look like? I assume the WMI and PSI were somewhat comparable to his VCI and PRI, since the FSIQ is in the same range.

    1. Reversing letters is not a huge red flag, per se, at this age.
    2. Misspelling words suggests that he has been learning to read predominantly by sight, not by phonics, which may be why he made a sudden leap recently, to the late second-grade level (he probably memorized the majority of the Dolch list/high-frequency words, which comprise about 60% of typical English text, thus giving him access to a great deal more reading, and substantially more fluency). This is more of an indicator of possible stealth dyslexia. The phonetically-reasonable spelling error that you gave as an example suggests that he has rudimentary phonological processing and phonics skills, but lacks the more sophisticated skills. This often means that grade-level testing will not pick up his deficits, since the PP skills that will expose his possible weaknesses are the higher-level ones expected in older students (such as phoneme manipulation tasks--phoneme reversal, substitution, deletion).
    3. His writing speed may or may not be a function of fine motor development alone. There are many factors that can affect that, not exclusively dyslexia. For example, vision, visual-motor coordination, retrieval efficiency (of letter formation, or of spelling), fatigue, inattention.
    4. This is another indicator that he probably reads by sight, not by phonics. Also suggests that motor coordination may be a factor, since oral-motor coordination is necessary for reading aloud. To be fair, it is also true of fluent readers in general, that silent reading is faster than oral reading. I don't think many of us can sustain oral reading at 300+ words per minute. (The average adult reads 250 wpm, silently, and there are probably quite a few people on this board who can read 400-800 wpm.)

    I think it would not be unreasonable to pursue assessment for stealth/compensated dyslexia, though it is, of course, possible that the process of learning to read for him is just taking a slightly different path from others, but will reach the same destination. If you pursue an evaluation, you will want to start with a psychologist experienced with 2e individuals. When you approach a prospective evaluator, you may wish to include in your assessment question concerns about his ability to decode novel words, and whether he has the underlying phonological processing and automaticity skills to be able to progress in basic reading skills at a level commensurate with his extremely high verbal ability. Though not a major issue in the primary years, it may become an obstacle as the volume and complexity of reading increase, and speed becomes a factor.

    The kind of assessments involved in a stealth dyslexia eval, in addition to the WISC-IV you already have, may include:

    1. Phonological processing: e.g., CTOPP/CTOPP-2, PAL-2, some subtests from the WISC-V, WJIII/WJIV, KTEA-2/KTEA-3. In particular, you want higher-level tasks involving phoneme manipulation, not just the low-level blending (c-a-t makes cat) and segmentation (cowboy is made up of cow-boy, or, slightly higher level, cat is made up of the sounds c-a-t) tasks.
    2. Phonetic decoding: nonsense word or pseudoword decoding tasks, such as the subtests with those names from KTEA-3, WIAT-III, WJIV, PAL-2. This is distinct from reading lists or passages of real words, which he will probably do rather well, using sight vocabulary.
    3. Oral reading fluency: measures of speed, which, in high-functioning dyslexics, often stand out as discrepant from the level of reading accuracy using real words. There are subtests on the PAL-2, WJIV, and KTEA-3 (also on the WIAT-III, but not at his grade level). The GORT-5 is an in-depth measure exclusively of this skill and related skills.
    4. Reading comprehension: subtests of the KTEA-3, WIAT-III, and WJIV, among others (in order of my preference). An excellent stand-alone measure is the TORC-4. Mainly interesting to demonstrate any possible discrepancies between reading decoding and reading comprehension skills. I would expect this to be relatively higher.
    5. Be open to wider-ranging assessments, as often the behaviors of concern can be interpreted in many different ways; one doesn't want preconceptions to blind one to a more comprehensive understanding of his learning profile.


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    Another (or additional) possibility might be vision problems. My son learned to decode at 2 and was reading at a first grade level by 3, but then stopped progressing for a good year. Then we found out that he had a moderate astigmatism. Once he got glasses and his eyes started working together better, his reading took off.

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    Our DD8 was diagnosed with dyslexia last fall, and I have benefited from aeh's excellent advice and help in understanding our assessment and next steps. So on top of her professional opinion, here's a few thoughts from the BTDT files:

    Dyslexia can be hard to spot in a gifted kid, especially if they have a good memory (which from your FSIQ I'm guessing yours does) and they are only 6. Most of the warning signs I saw on regular websites did not apply to DD, especially those related to early language acquisition and use. While nothing in your description struck as me as immediately concerning in a 6-year old, I am assuming there was more you saw in the stealth dyslexia description that resonated. I certainly wish we had started our journey a couple years earlier, so if things don't feel right to you, keep asking questions.

    A great place to start before spending thousands on assessment is Sally Shaywitz's book (http://www.amazon.ca/Overcoming-Dyslexia-Complete-Science-Based-Problems/dp/0679781595) which really gets into details of what to look for at young ages.

    From my obsessive research so far, there seem to be two most common warning signs in young dyslexics who read well:

    (1) Unusual difficulty with spelling, particularly if they use non-phonetic spelling, or tend to scramble the order of the sounds, or leave out some sounds ("sik" for "sick" is phonetic, and probably age-appropriate; "ski" would be more worrisome). I should note this common warning didn't work so well with our DD, as she has quite high phonological awareness for a dyslexic, and her spelling was reasonably phonetic (she only fell apart on the kinds of more complex phoneme manipulation tasks aeh describes above). She did have a bit of a tendency to leave off sounds towards the ends of words.

    (2) Clear differences between how well they read text in context vs. isolated words vs. nonsense words. We had long suspected that our DD was just guessing at what her books said based on pictures, first letters of the word, and context cues, but we had no idea how to prove it. Turns out we were right. She was reading - in two languages - "on grade level" in grade 2, but when we gave her a long list of isolated three-letter words, we'd start to see errors (usually extra letters, such as "fog" became "frog"). For a stealth dyslexic, more complex texts are easier than short, simple ones. Isolated nonsense words are just deadly.

    From our own experience, red flags I can now recognize in retrospect include:

    * Being unable to read a word she'd just read correctly several times, even when on the same page.

    * Substituting words when reading out loud, with a plausible alternative that starts with the same letter.

    * From age 5 - 7 she was able to read increasingly complex levelled texts out loud with a fairly consistent error rate, but they never got easier - and the EASY texts never got easier even when could could read the harder ones (i.e. same error rate regardless of text difficulty).

    * Rhyming is often a problem for dyslexics. While DD always loved making rhymes, she could get confused about the difference between rhyme and alliteration (same first sounds) even when probably as old as 6 (or more?).

    * She hated reading out loud, even when she seemed quite able to.

    * She'd avoid reading voluntarily, even when it seemed difficult to avoid (e.g. bringing home a library book from school without knowing what the title was - but then reading the whole book to me when I required her to)

    * Avoiding reading people's name's in a text - which I now realize was avoiding non-sight words.

    * Her writing seemed fine at age 5 - but looked the same at age 7.

    Our DD has only average working memory (and ADHD-I), and her ability to compensate fell apart by grade 3. However, I am realizing that 99.9th percentile memories may be common in her father's gene pool, and I believe we have several adult dyslexics, including my DH, who read - very well, but slooooowly - through sheer brute force memory of sight words. If DD had that memory too, she might still be as undiagnosed as the rest of them.

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    Fascinating. Lots of this seems familiar - my daughter once spelled Mississippi without a single S. On a test, after they'd been working on it in class. DD8 often spells 'she' as 'hse'.
    DD12 seems to be getting by just fine now, though she vaguely wishes she read faster and still prefers audiobooks/being read to over reading on her own, especially for text that's more complex (high school vs 5th grade fiction). Are there guidelines for when compensation is good enough, and when dyslexia should really be remediated?

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    ljoy, you might also enjoy the Shaywitz book. (Huge warning: I am no expert, so what I say here is my best understanding of the state of the evidence these days, just based on my own reading!)

    One of the really fascinating things the Yale group is doing is using MRI to show the neurological deficit which is dyslexia. They can actually show the part of the brain activated when most people read, where a sort of "automated recognition" of words is stored (please don't quote me on this explanation!). Dyslexics don't activate that part of the brain when they read, but instead scramble to cobble together input from all sorts of miscellaneous places not meant for the job. Some verbally-gifted people can pull this off pretty decently and read with great accuracy - but if they are dyslexic, they will probably never read very quickly.

    A huge shock to me was the recent discovery that my DH - who reads and writes for a living - reads at the same speed silently as out loud. I was beyond stunned (I am a particularly fast reader).

    The problem is that using the "wrong" part of the brain to read is hugely demanding and inefficient. DH admits that reading is tiring, and while he reads large volumes professionally every day, he doesn't tend to do it for fun. So much brain power is used just for trying to make out the text, there's that much less left for higher-level comprehension, analysis, and just plain thinking about it. DH is good proof that a high-functioning dyslexic (with enough memory power) can be successful, and undetectable (we never suspected a thing until after DD was diagnosed). But we're also starting to recognize the price he has paid throughout his life for reading and spelling being so unusually demanding of time and energy.

    So, to your specific questions:

    A dyslexic may always get more out of an audio than written text, because they free up huge brain resources for higher-level thinking about it. So I would always encourage the use of both written and audio, even if reading skills seem adequate.

    With dyslexia remediation, some of the reading workload will shift to the part of the brain designed for it (check out their MRI images of pre-post - it's really quite amazing). So reading, even if it was already highly accurate, can still become less demanding, faster and more fluent. And there's more brain left available for other tasks.

    It sounds like spelling is also a challenge; remediation could probably reduce some of that pain and the time it consumes.

    And finally, according to DH, if you could actually decode rather than sight-read the world, all those ^$%^$ god and monster names in Percy Jackson wouldn't have caused him such excruciating misery when he read all ten books out loud to DD last year.

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    I have a dd with a reading LD that isn't exactly classic dyslexia, isn't exactly stealth dyslexia, but is diagnosed as dyslexia (after an extensive reading assessment) and her reading tutors have used a combo of Lindamood Bell and Barton to help remediate. She's in 5th grade now, we started suspecting issues with reading as early as first grade, but it took until 3rd grade (and outside evals) to get to the root of the issues. School staff never did see an issue because she was able to compensate based on her other high level abilities.

    Originally Posted by ljoy
    Are there guidelines for when compensation is good enough, and when dyslexia should really be remediated?

    I don't know about specific guidelines, and I'm not a professional so take what I say with a grain of salt - this is only my experience as a parent speaking smile My dyslexic dd is my third child. My oldest never had any issues with reading; my middle child struggled tremendously with reading in 1st-2nd grade until we realized she had a vision issue. Once the vision issue was resolved, she turned into one of those kids who always ALWAYS has her nose in a book and who reads tremendously quickly so we're always dealing with how to keep her happily supplied with books that will take longer than two hours to read. This is what I've noticed re my third dd, who thanks to her challenges with reading - never does it for pleasure and struggles to understand what she has to read for school at times, particularly before she had remediation for reading. In spite of her high aptitude, she doesn't *ever* read for pleasure and she doesn't read over and above what's absolutely required for research type projects at school. The take-away from that - her vocabulary is limited, especially compared to her older siblings, and also compared to her classmates. This wasn't apparent earlier on - when she was in lower grades her vocabulary was comparable to classmates because she was absorbing vocabulary from conversation. As she grew, however, the lack of reading experience compounded from having limited ability to decode words prior to remediation, to now having limited ability to recognize higher level vocabulary words as she encounters new words in reading that she hasn't seen before. There's a bit of a pyramid impact of not having the same background level of reading her peers had, as well as continuing to not read as many words total as they do (most of her classmates read for pleasure as well as read classroom text quicker simply because they don't have the same issues with decoding etc). NOTE - she's had very successful remediation - she's light years ahead of where she was a few years ago, but she's still not on par with classmates just because of that lost time when she wasn't reading and wasn't acquiring new vocabulary through reading. Based on that experience, my recommendation is that *compensation is never the answer* - if you suspect a reading challenge, get an assessment, and if a challenge is discovered, start remediating asap.

    Have more to say, but have to run - more later!

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    What sort of reading testing does his school do at the kindergarten level? In the second semester of kinder at my child's school they do the dibels test, which includes a part where the child has to read nonsense words.

    Everything that you mentioned, except the slow writing are perfectly normal for a child his age/grade. Spelling "sick" as "sik" is phonetic, and exactly what you would expect from a kinder to first grade child. The fact that he is gifted does complicate things, as what it normal for an average ability child is may not be normal for a gifted child.

    Personally, I wouldn't do outside testing at this point, especially since you mentioned that he is reading at a second grade level. Since he is highly gifted, you might expect his reading level to be even higher, but that is high enough in my mind so as not to be a red flag.

    I would wait until first grade when they tend to do more reading assessments at school and begin spelling tests. If he struggles in spelling/reading at that point, I would take him for additional testing. I was diagnosed in first grade with dyslexia, and that was still early enough to be successfully remediated for the most severe/limiting issues that dyslexic people encounter. I can read very well, even compared to people without dyslexia, but have below average spelling ability.

    My son is ID'd as gifted (though not so much in reading, his strength is math/nonverbal) and he was not a good reader in kinder. He couldn't even blend three letter words until January of kinder year, and that was after I worked with him on it. I was concerned that he might be dyslexic at that point, especially given his genetics (both my father and I are dyslexic). He also had letter reversals, though so did around half of the class. His writing was otherwise unremarkable, though as I recall in kinder they are writing such things as "I see the dog.", I'm not sure how much you can pick up from that.

    Now he is in third grade and he reads above grade level and recently placed at a district spelling competition. His spelling ability will likely eclipse mine in the next year or two. He is obviously not dyslexic even though it looked very possible in kinder.

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    Thanks, everyone, for all of the responses. It is very helpful.

    His WMI and PSI were actually much lower (I don't have the assessment in my hand at the moment), though still in the average to above average range. I've read that this can be fairly typical of gifted children, however (he also has perfectionistic tendencies and this slows him down on some things). Apparently this can sometimes lower your FSIQ but not always (though I don't understand why), and in his case it did not.

    Some other things I've learned about him in the last few days:

    • He has noticed that he is the slowest writer in his class. We experimented and he agreed to write out the alphabet from memory (both capital and lower case letters) under a stopwatch. It took him over 5 minutes to complete (though his letters came out fine... a little squished to the right margin as he was running out of room, but nothing reversed or anything like that).
    • When he reads aloud (which he seems to enjoy), I've noticed that he will often skip words, substitute larger words he doesn't recognize for words that begin with the same letter, and sometimes leave off the plural s.
    • He tells me that he knows that spelling of the word he wants to write, but when he goes to write it, sometimes the complete wrong letters come out (for instance, he may spell 'you' as 'yow' and then will go back and erase the 'w').
    • Though my spouse and my vision require glasses, his vision has been checked recently and it's been fine.
    • He does seem to do much better with longer passages and worse with short, out-of-context phrases. Today, he and another kid his age were both attempting to read a sign that said 'Park Hours.' I could hear the other kid sounding out each letter of 'Hours.' My kid, however, stared at it for awhile, and then said, 'I think it says Hobson' (a lot of things are named Hobson near us, so it's a familiar with to him).


    We're trying to get him to write a bit more to see if it's merely a matter of practice. He's really into nature right now, so we're having him keep a journal and write down some things he thinks about. So far, he has written down a few things, but he seems to prefer drawing pictures to writing phrases.

    To put all of this in comparison, he composed a story for school a few weeks back that I took dictation for... and it was phenomenal for someone his age: really rich in description with a complex plot that centered around an advanced play on words. His story was ranked #1 for his class. It's good to know that, even if this isn't coming out when he writes, he is extraordinarily expressive.

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    As someone mentioned, stealth dyslexia can look very different in each child. Most people have been mentioning that for their children when they did learn to read it was slow, but this is not the case for all children with stealth dyslexia. My DS7 reads extremely fast (by far the fastest in his class), and he can easily spend three or four hours reading without a break (and then gets upset when we make him stop). However he struggles with other aspects such as spelling, reading words out of context, getting thoughts out on paper, etc.

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