Dysorthographia: how do people with dysorthographia perceive words?
A common misconception: children with dysorthographia would see letters backwards or jumbled. The neurological reality is much 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 clarify: dysorthographia is not a vision problem. 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 memorises the correspondences between heard sounds and written forms.
Unstable phonological representations
What is truly disrupted in people 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 systematically and automatically associate a heard sound with 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 called orthographic memory. Where an ordinary reader gradually memorises the written form of frequent words until reproducing 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 sound very alike — they differ only by one or two subtle acoustic features. For an already fragile phonological system, this similarity generates recurring and persistent confusions.
What this means for remediation
Understanding the perceptual and memory mechanisms involved in dysorthographia makes it possible to adapt remediation 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.
