APHASIA: The loss or impairment of the power to use words usually resulting from a brain injury or disease.
CONSTITUTIONAL ORIGIN: Having an inborn developmental basis.
DEVELOPMENTAL AUDITORY IMPERCEPTION: Characterized by having difficulty in learning sounds, sound-symbol relationships and the meaning of words, despite adequate intelligence and socio-cultural opportunity.
DYSLEXIA (Specific Developmental Dyslexia): Difficulty with the alphabet, reading, reading comprehension, writing and spelling, in spite of adequate intelligence, exposure and cultural opportunity.
DYSPHASIA: Characterized by difficulty in learning both receptive and expressive oral language, despite adequate hearing, intelligence, and socio-cultural opportunity.
DYSGRAPHIA: Characterized by the inability to write legibly. This occurs in the absence of other difficulties in written language. This difficulty is not caused by visual-motor incoordination.
DEVELOPMENTAL SPELLING DISORDER: Characterized by significant difficulty in learning to spell. This occurs in the absence of reading or other written language difficulties.
INDIVIDUALIZED: A reading program in which both materials and methods are matched to each student's individual ability level, interests, and learning style.
INTENSIVE PHONICS (Analytic and Synthetic Phonics): An approach to phonics and synthetic phonics. Analytic phonics takes students from what they know about letters and their corresponding sounds and asks them to rearrange these letters to make new words. For example, if a student already knows the word "can" by sight, he or she can form new words by adding known initial consonants to the phonogram "an". Synthetic phonics asks students to learn the sounds of the letters first and then combine or blend these sounds to create words. Synthetic or analytic phonics would be used depending on the student's instructional needs.
LINGUISTICS: The study of language, where linguists have identified the units of language, the meaning of units of language, and the patterns that occur in language.
Linguistic reading materials often use phonograms found in the English language as the primary source of words for their texts. For example, a linguistic reader might contain such a sentence as "Dan can fan the man".
Recently some linguists have extended the linguistic approach to include an understanding of language and how it is learned. The "total language approach" has been derived from this belief.
MEANING BASED: For a text to have some meaning for the reader, many factors must be taken into account. Most recent research has shown that prior knowledge of the content included in the text may be the most influential factor in a person's understanding of a text. Written compositions are excellent ways to tap a student's understanding of language, because for the most part, one cannot compose with words one does not understand.
MULTISENSORY: An approach that makes a concerted attempt to include more than one mode of presentation of information -- visual, auditory, kinesthetic (muscle sense). Presenting information in this way is sometimes called a "bombardment approach" in which the student is asked to see it, hear it, and feel it.
PROCESS ORIENTED: Word recognition skills and comprehension skills are not the end in themselves but rather the means, or processes, students need to become independent readers.
RELATED DISORDERS: Disorders similar to or related to dyslexia such as developmental auditory imperception, dysphasia, specific developmental dyslexia, developmental dysgraphia, and developmental spelling disability.
SPECIFIC LEARNING DISABILITIES: A disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or using language, spoken or written, which may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calculations. The term includes such conditions as perceptual handicaps, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia.
*Developed by Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Crippled Children