The Science: Reading Disabilities & Dyslexia

Certain frontal and prefrontal brain areas are involved in directing attention, planning, holding stimuli in memory and performing complex stimulus transformation (Eden et al., 1993). Verbal fluency scores are significantly correlated with brain metabolic activity in these cortical areas (Bontempi et al., 1996). Inefficiencies in auditory sequential processing produces problems with word attack and reading comprehension, while visual processing issues impact reading speed, visual word attack skills and comprehension. NACD's sequential processing exercises appear to elicit positive changes in reading.

During the first two years of life, the basic soundstage of native language becomes mapped in the nervous system and provides the phonemic elements that evolve into language (Eslinger, 2003). Each meaning element is generated and integrated with a previous element that is still held in the focus of attention (Martin, 1993). Once the text is understood, readers have memories of the important aspects, even when retention is delayed (Temple et al., 2000). Text structure is constructed in long-term memory (Rolke, Heil, Hennighausen, Haussler, & Rosler, 2000; Watson & Willows, 1995). For this structure to be continually expanded to integrate new information from the text, relevant parts of it must remain accessible during reading. When the next sentence is processed, some elements of the current structure of the text are kept in short-term memory to provide context as well as to serve as retrieval cues for the accessible portions of the structure (MacAndrew et al., 2002). NACD recognizes that text comprehension is a sequencial process; therefore NACD fosters comprehension via sequential processing exercises (for example, Simply Smarter® Online), which improve short-term memory capacity (Just & Carpenter, 1992).