Written 2-Dimensional Abstract Words Cause Dyslexic Confusion and Learning Problems

1. How do you recognize the meaning of words?
2. Word visualizing exercise
3. Confusion starts to build when reading abstract stumble words
4. The mind takes a mental health break

Dyslexic Confusion Starts to Build When Reading Abstract Words

How Do You Recognize the Meaning of Words?

How do you assign meaning to words?  What do you visualize or understand when you hear a word? How do you make sense of the 2-dimensional letters that make up a word? What gives an abstract word (one that has no inherent meaning) meaning?

 

When reading the word “car” in a newspaper, a book or a magazine article, do you see your car? “No!” No one sees their own car.

Since you have no confusion about what the word looks like ( c-a-r ), what it sounds like (kär), and what it means (a vehicle that moves on wheels), you keep reading until the sentence or paragraph fills in the details of what the car looks like in the story. It is easy to imagine concrete words like "car."

How do you visualize them? 

Do we all assign the same meaning to a word we hear?

How do you recognize and understand words you hear?

 

The following  exercise will give you an experience of how you and your friends visualize words.

Word Visualizing Exercise: 

Ask your spouse or some other adult to:

1. “Picture pencil” …               “What do you see?”
2. “Picture beach ball”…        “What do you see?”
3. “Make it spin …"                  "Now make it stop.”
4. “Picture house” …              “What did you see?” ...

Four out five people will see their own house. (If the person has not pictured his house, ask him to “picture spouse.”)

Now ask your spouse or adult to:

1.    “Picture ‘the'." ....

The answer you get over 99% of the time is: (the letter symbols) “t –h- e” or  “blank… I see nothing.” 

Notice that when I said to you, “picture pencil,” you did not go to picturing the letters of the word pencil. Instead you pictured the 3-dimensional object. The same occurred when you pictured beach ball and house. However, there is no 3-dimensional object that the word “the” represents; therefore, you could not picture it.

Concrete Words

 

Concrete words like dog, car, house can be pictured or can be internally experienced by any of the senses. There is no sensory or mental confusion in learning their meaning and how to recognize and read them.

Abstract Stumble Words

The opposite is true for abstract stumble words. Unlike concrete words, stumble words cannot be pictured or sensed.  Unfortunately for the young reader, stumble words make up more than 50% of the words in books read by children in Kindergarten through 3rd grade! 

How can we expect the young reader to know how to think and read when 50 % of the words he meets in a reading assignment are inherently meaningless stumble words (for example, the, a, in, on, there, his, or that).

 The Mind Takes a Mental-Health Break

After running into a series of stumble words over a couple of sentences, paragraphs or pages, the senses overload with confusion and the brain dis-integrates - the processing of information is no longer integrated throughout the brain. Due to the frustration of confusion and lack of brain integration, the mind’s eye of the reader takes a mental health break … the student’s imagination and focus leave the task!

 

Typically, after several months of this type of stress-release behavior, the teacher will label your son or daughter as a day-dreamer, as lazy, or as unable to stay focused. The teacher believes she cannot help your child because he cannot stay connected to the work they are doing.

 

Your child may be sent to special education as someone else’s problem, and your child may be labeled to be a poor reader and a poor learner.  Unless there is organic damage, injury or chemical imbalance to the brain, this is seldom the truth of the situation!

 

Your child is learning and reading the best he can with the tools being given to him. However, these tools are inadequate and what results is high frustration and fatigue while reading.