Childhood Disabilities & Disorders
- When to Seek Therapy
- Disabilities & Disorders
- ADHD/ADD
- Anxiety Disorders
- Apraxia of Speech, Childhood
- Articulation Disorders
- Asperger's Syndrome
- Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Birth Injuries
- Central Auditory Processing Disorder
- Cerebral Palsy
- Clubfoot
- Conduct Disorder
- Down Syndrome
- Elimination disorders (enuresis and encopresis)
- Failure to thrive/feeding disorder
- Fine and Gross Motor Delays
- Fluency/Stuttering
- Fracture
- Fragile X Syndrome
- Gait abnormalities
- Global Developmental Delay
- Hip dysplasia
- Language Delays
- Learning Disabilities
- Legg-Calve-Perthes Disease
- Mental Retardation
- Mood Disorders
- Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)
- Oral Motor Disorders
- Orthopedic conditions
- Osgood-Schlatter Disease
- Pervasive Developmental Disorder
- Pica
- Reactive attachment disorder of infancy or early childhood
- Reading Disorders
- Scoliosis
- Selective Mutism
- Sensory Processing Disorder
- Separation anxiety disorder
- Tic disorders
- Torticollis (Wry Neck)
- Additional Resources
Reading Disorders
A reading disorder is a condition in which an individual has difficulty reading, primarily due to neurological factors. Reading disorders include dyslexia and hyperlexia.
Common indicators of reading disorders include difficulty with:
- Phonemic awareness (the ability to break up words into their component sounds), and
- Matching letter combinations to specific sounds.
Dyslexia
Dyslexia manifests itself as a difficulty with reading decoding, reading comprehension and/or reading fluency. Dyslexia can be developmental or acquired. Acquired dyslexia is also called “alexia”.
Dyslexia has been proposed to have three cognitive subtypes: auditory, visual and attentional. Common characteristics of people with dyslexia include: difficulty with spelling, phonological processing (the manipulation of sounds), and/or rapid visual-verbal responding.
Dyslexia and IQ are not interrelated. Dyslexia is considered a reading disorder, as well as a learning disability, rather than a cognitive impairment. Overall intelligence in people with dyslexia is generally normal.
It can be inherited and recent studies have identified a number of genes that may predispose an individual to becoming dyslexic. Approximately 5% to 17% of the population is estimated to be affected by dyslexia.
Hyperlexia
Hyperlexic children have average or above average IQs and highly superior reading ability to what would be expected given their ages and IQs. In some cases, however, individuals with hyperlexia have trouble understanding speech. Most, if not all, children with hyperlexia are on the autism spectrum. It is estimated that 5% to 10% of autistic children are hyperlexic.
