Infantile age (0-first year of life):
- delayed or atypical motor development,
- minimal neurological dysfunctions (e.g. reduced muscle tone, overlong primary innate reflexes).
Infantile age (2-3 years):
- delayed gross motor development (difficulties with balance, delayed gait development and automatisation),
- delayed development of fine motor skills (manual dexterity, awkwardness in self-care and manipulative play),
- poor eye-hand coordination and delayed graphomotor development,
- delayed speech development.
Preschool age (3-5 years):
- poor fine motor skills in whole body movements, poor functioning in all motor games (running, cycling, balance exercises, etc.),
- poor fine motor skills (difficulty and reluctance to carry out self-service activities and manipulative play),
- impaired eye-hand coordination (child’s reluctance to draw, very simplified drawings, incorrect grip on writing instruments),
- impaired visual function, e.g. difficulty in drawing, assembling pictures according to a pattern, doing puzzles,
- disorders of linguistic functions (delayed speech development, incorrect articulation of many sounds, prolonged use of neologisms, difficulty in remembering short rhymes and songs,
- difficulty in building speech, limited vocabulary),
- delayed development of lateralisation and orientation in body scheme and space.
Class (6-7 years of age)
- persistence of symptoms of reduced fine motor skills,
- Reduced manual dexterity (difficulty in making precise movements in the area of self-care, difficulty in mastering correct motor habits while drawing and writing),
- impaired visuo-motor coordination (persistent abnormal grip of writing instruments, difficulty in drawing rhymes, reproducing complex geometrical figures),
- impaired visual functions (difficulty to distinguish elements from the whole and to synthesise them into a whole, difficulty to distinguish similar shapes, e.g. geometrical figures and letters),
- problems with remembering and understanding longer verbal instructions,
- difficulty remembering names, a poem, a song, a series, a sequence, and more than one command at the same time; cannot name the seasons in the correct order,
- delayed development of lateralisation (no determination of the dominant hand, ambidextrousness),
- disordered orientation in body scheme and space,
- disturbed orientation in time,
- increased difficulties in learning to read (very slow reading mainly based on the technique of voting, often without correct secondary synthesis, twisting of words, lack of comprehension of the text read),
- difficulties in first attempts at writing.
School age (class I – III):
- motor disorders (low whole-body motor skills, reluctance to participate in motor games and physical education lessons),
- reduced hand dexterity (not fully mastered self-service activities related to dressing, washing and eating),
- impaired hand-eye coordination (reluctance to draw and write, persistent abnormal grip and muscle tone disorders when writing, difficulty in drawing lines in a ruler, reproduction of complex geometric figures, overall low graphical level of drawings and writing),
- persistent visual dysfunction with symptoms from the previous age group and increased difficulty in distinguishing between similar shapes (e.g. letters m-n, l-t-l) or identical but differently positioned shapes in space (e.g. letters p-g-b-d),
- impaired language functions (impaired pronunciation, distortion of complex words, often distorts words, e.g. says sosza (instead of szosa), lora (instead of rola), has difficulty dividing words into syllables, difficulty with phonological and sequential memory, difficulty in remembering sequences of names, time and number sequences, poems, songs, multiplication tables),
- persistent ambidextrousness,
- impaired orientation in body scheme and space (difficulty to distinguish between right and left hand, side of the body, difficulty to determine the position of objects in relation to each other,
- incorrectly names spatial relations (e.g. over, under),
- writing letters and numbers mirroring each other and/or writing words from right to left),
- increased difficulty in learning to read (reluctant to try to read, tends to read more slowly than his/her peers when reading words, omits, adds, rearranges, substitutes letters, very slow reading speed with primitive spelling or syllabication technique with secondary word synthesis and few errors, or very fast reading speed but with numerous errors due to guessing content from context, inappropriate and poor comprehension of the text read),
- impaired time orientation cannot name the days of the week in the correct order.
At older school age (above grade four)
Some of the symptoms present in children at the initial education stage persist and some change. In older pupils with developmental dyslexia, the most common findings are:
- slow reading speed, reluctance to read,
- incorrect spelling dominated by spelling mistakes,
- difficulties remembering: rhymes, terms, names (e.g. months), dates, data, telephone numbers, twisting of names, multi-digit numbers,
- difficulties in school subjects requiring good visual perception, spatial perception and visual memory: in geography – poor orientation on the map, in geometry – simplified, schematic drawings, in chemistry – failure to remember the chains of chemical reactions,
- difficulties in school subjects requiring good auditory perception and memory for speech sounds: in foreign languages, in biology – in mastering terminology, in history – in remembering names, surnames.
All the symptoms listed above occur individually in children with varying degrees of severity. They change dynamically in the course of the child’s development, education and therapy.
Sources:
- M. Dąbrowska: Dysleksja w ujęciu psycholingwistycznym. Przegląd badań. Psychologia Wychowawcza Nr 4 1995 r.
- https://zdrowie.radiozet.pl/Ciaza-i-dziecko/Zdrowie-dziecka/Dysleksja-rozwojowa-na-czym-polega-to-zaburzenie?
- M. Bogdanowicz, A. Borkowska, Model rozpoznawania specyficznych trudności w czytaniu i pisaniu
- M.B. Pecyna (red.), Dysleksja rozwojowa. Fakt i tajemnica w diagnostyce psychologiczno-pedagogicznej
