A reading disability is a condition in which a person displays difficulty reading. Examples of reading disabilities include: developmental dyslexia, alexia, and hyperlexia.
Dame Uta Frith is a German-British developmental psychologist at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. She has pioneered much of the current research into autism and dyslexia. She has written several books on these subjects, arguing for autism to be seen as a mental condition rather than as one caused by parenting. Her Autism: Explaining the Enigma introduces the cognitive neuroscience of autism. She is credited with creating the Sally–Anne test along with fellow scientists Alan Leslie and Simon Baron-Cohen. She also pioneered the work on child dyslexia. Among students she has mentored are Tony Attwood, Maggie Snowling, Simon Baron-Cohen and Francesca Happé.
The phonological deficit hypothesis is a prevalent cognitive-level explanation for the cause of reading difficulties and dyslexia. It stems from evidence that individuals with dyslexia tend to do poorly on tests which measure their ability to decode nonsense words using conventional phonetic rules, and that there is a high correlation between difficulties in connecting the sounds of language to letters and reading delays or failure in children.
Dr. Marion Blank is the creator of the Reading Kingdom program, the creator and former director of the A Light on Literacy program at Columbia University in New York, and most recently the creator of Comprendi, a first-of-its-kind reading system designed specifically to improve reading comprehension. She is a developmental psychologist with a specialization in language and learning.
Leonard Katz (1938–2017) was an American experimental psychologist, born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut (1965–2006) and then professor emeritus until 2017. He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Psychological Science.
Catherine Alexandra McBride,, was formerly the Choh-Ming Li Professor of Developmental Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) specializing in the acquisition of early literacy skills. She is currently the Associate Dean for Research for the College of Health and Human Sciences at Purdue University and also a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science, and remains an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at CUHK. She received her BA in psychology from Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. She received her MA in 1992 and PhD in 1994 from the University of Southern California, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. She has written two books (namely, Children's Literacy Development and Coping with Dyslexia, Dysgraphia and ADHD: A Global Perspective and co-edited three others. She is currently the Past-President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.
Dyslexia is a complex, lifelong disorder involving difficulty in learning to read or interpret words, letters and other symbols. Dyslexia does not affect general intelligence, but is often co-diagnosed with ADHD. There are at least three sub-types of dyslexia that have been recognized by researchers: orthographic, or surface dyslexia, phonological dyslexia and mixed dyslexia where individuals exhibit symptoms of both orthographic and phonological dyslexia. Studies have shown that dyslexia is genetic and can be passed down through families, but it is important to note that, although a genetic disorder, there is no specific locus in the brain for reading and writing. The human brain does have language centers, but written language is a cultural artifact, and a very complex one requiring brain regions designed to recognize and interpret written symbols as representations of language in rapid synchronization. The complexity of the system and the lack of genetic predisposition for it is one possible explanation for the difficulty in acquiring and understanding written language.
Dyslexia is a disorder characterized by problems with the visual notation of speech, which in most languages of European origin are problems with alphabet writing systems which have a phonetic construction. Examples of these issues can be problems speaking in full sentences, problems correctly articulating Rs and Ls as well as Ms and Ns, mixing up sounds in multi-syllabic words, problems of immature speech such as "wed and gween" instead of "red and green".
Kenneth R. Pugh is president, director of research, and a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut and professor in the Department of Psychology at University of Connecticut. He is also an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University, an associate professor in the Department of Diagnostic Radiology at the Yale School of Medicine, and director of the Yale Reading Center. Pugh is a cognitive neuroscientist and experimental psychologist who is best known for his work on the neural, behavioral and cognitive underpinnings of reading and other cognitive activities.
Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, teacher, and advocate for children and literacy around the world. She is the UCLA Professor-in-Residence of Education, Director of the UCLA Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice, and the Chapman University Presidential Fellow (2018-2022). She is also the former John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service, Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research, and Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She is a permanent academician in the Pontifical Academy of Science. She was recently made an Honorary Advisory Fellow on the United Sigma Intelligence Association.
Beatrix A. Hamburg was an American psychiatrist whose long career in academic medicine advanced the field of child and adolescent psychiatry. Hamburg was the first known African-American to attend Vassar College, and was also the first African-American woman to attend Yale Medical School. Hamburg held professorships at Stanford, Harvard, Mt. Sinai and—most recently—at Weill Cornell Medical College. She was on the President's Commission on Mental Health under President Jimmy Carter. Hamburg was a president of the William T. Grant Foundation, and also directed the child psychiatry divisions at Stanford University and Mount Sinai. She originally was going to go into pediatric medicine, but instead found herself interested in psychiatry. She researched early adolescence, peer counseling, and diabetic children and adolescents. She was a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received a Foremother Award for her lifetime of accomplishments from the National Research Center for Women & Families in 2012.
Dynaread Special Education Corporation is a provider of dyslexia remediation services specifically designed for older struggling readers.
Marian Cleeves Diamond was an American scientist and educator who is considered one of the founders of modern neuroscience. She and her team were the first to publish evidence that the brain can change with experience and improve with enrichment, what is now called neuroplasticity. Her research on the brain of Albert Einstein helped fuel the ongoing scientific revolution in understanding the roles of glial cells in the brain. She was a professor of anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley. Other published research explored differences between the cerebral cortex of male and female rats, the link between positive thinking and immune health, and the role of women in science.
Laurie Cutting is an American scholar of psychology and pediatrics. She is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Special Education, Psychology and Human Development, Radiology, and Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. In addition, she is associate director of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center and a member of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, training faculty for Vanderbilt's Neuroscience Ph.D. program.
Kathleen Ries Merikangas is the Chief of the Genetic Epidemiology Research Branch in the Intramural Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and an adjunct professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has published more than 300 papers, and is best known for her work in adolescent mental disorders.
Silvia Paracchini FRSE is a geneticist who researches the contribution of genetic variation to neurodevelopmental traits such as dyslexia and human handedness.
Thara Rangaswamy is a psychiatrist in India, the co-founder of an NGO called SCARF based in Chennai, India. She is a researcher in schizophrenia and community mental health. In 2020, she received the SIRS Outstanding Clinical and Community Research Award of SIRS, an apex body for work on schizophrenia in Florence, Italy.
Margaret Byrd Rawson was an American educator, researcher and writer. She was an early leader in the field of dyslexia, conducting one of the longest-running studies of language disorders ever undertaken and publishing nine books on dyslexia.
Sophie Molholm is an American neuroscientist, who is the director of the Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory (CNL) and the Human Clinical Phenotyping Core (HCP) at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. She is professor (tenured) of Paediatrics, Neuroscience and Psychiatry, and Behavioral Sciences, and was endowed as the Muriel and Harold Block Faculty Scholar in Mental Illness at Einstein (2012–2017).
Ayana Jordan is an American addiction psychiatrist and immunopathologist. She researches treatments for substance use disorders in marginalized communities. She is the Barbara Wilson Associate Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Langone Health and was a professor at Yale School of Medicine. She served as an attending psychiatrist in the Yale University Department of Psychiatry. She was elected to the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association in 2018. She attended Hampton University and received her MD and PhD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
