Dysorthographia: how do people with dysorthographia perceive words?
A common misconception is that children with dysorthographia see letters back to front or in a jumble. The neurological reality is far more nuanced — and far more interesting. Here is what research tells us about how people with dysorthographia process written words.
Dysorthographia is not a vision disorder
First, let’s clear something up: dysorthographia is not a problem with eyesight. People with dysorthographia perceive letters exactly as others do — their visual acuity is normal. It is not the visual perception of letters that is disrupted, but their cognitive processing — the way the brain encodes and stores the correspondences between heard sounds and written forms.
Unstable phonological representations
What is really disrupted in a person with dysorthographia is the stability of phonological representations — the way the sounds of language are stored in memory. These representations are imprecise or unstable, which makes it difficult to form a systematic and automatic link between a heard sound and the letter or letters that represent it in writing. The result: orthographic encoding is slow, laborious and unreliable.
A faulty orthographic memory
Beyond phonology, people with dysorthographia often struggle to memorise the exact visual form of words — what is known as orthographic memory. Where an ordinary reader gradually memorises the written form of frequent words until they reproduce them automatically, a person with dysorthographia often has to “rebuild” the spelling each time — a slow and unreliable process that generates many errors.
Why are certain letters confused?
The characteristic confusions of dysorthographia — b/p/d/t, f/v, s/z, an/en — result from imprecision in the phonological representations of these similar sounds. These sounds are very alike phonetically — they differ only by one or two subtle acoustic features. For an already fragile phonological system, this closeness generates recurring and persistent confusions.
What this means for remedial therapy
Understanding the perceptual and memory mechanisms involved in dysorthographia makes it possible to tailor remedial therapy more precisely. The methods that strengthen phonological representations — auditory discrimination training, work on phonemic awareness — and those that strengthen orthographic memory — visualisation, spaced repetition, photographed words — are the most effective. For comprehensive resources on the mechanisms of dysorthographia, lesdys.fr offers guides accessible to families and professionals.
