Dyslexia is a specific reading disorder characterized by difficulties in recognizing letters, decoding, and spelling. Such alterations result from implications in the development of phonologic skills.

Dyslexia causes a great amount of difficulty in reading, writing and problems at school. These difficulties cause inconveniences since the early stages of reading until adulthood and, therefore, it is important to have special attention from parents and educators. The disorder affects approximately 3 to 4% of school aged children and boys are more afflicted than girls.

Analyzing content will be hard; reading may be slow, causing trouble with subtitles at the movies, for instance, or understanding instructions and sentences; difficulties in learning a new language, as well as problems in writing, such as inverting, exchanging, or omitting letters, while writing a composition and errors in subject-verb agreement.

Some of the fundamental difficulties frequently observed in dyslexic children are slow, monosyllabic reading with little expressiveness, stumbling on long, unfamiliar words; attempt to guess words and the need of context in order to understand the reading. On the other hand, there is no problem in understanding texts that are read out loud to the child.

The causes for dyslexia are not very clear. However, it is believed that there is a peculiar functioning of the brain for processing reading and writing skills. There is probably a brain dysfunction, a temporal processing disorder in which perception, repetition, storage, naming, recovery and access to information are impaired. The reading process involves the activation of multiple regions of the brain, such as the visual cortex in the occipital lobe, the left angular gyrus, the left temporal lobe and the Wernicke’s area, where there is phonological decoding with the translation of written symbols to the auditory ones. Impairment in any of these regions can result in a specific reading problem.