Kinesthetic feedback and dyslexic students learning to read and write.

CAN TRAINING to improve kinesthetic feedback help dyslexic students who have difficulties learning to read and write? I suggest that such training can help, and that the general semantics formulation of silent levels will assist us in understanding the processes involved.

Our verbal descriptions are abstractions from non-verbal experiences. According to general semantics, such non-verbal experiences occur at the silent levels. In this article, I explore just what these silent levels may consist of, and how they are related to the specific tasks of reading and writing. My working hypothesis is that our experiences of the silent levels to a large extent are made up of kinesthetic feedback.

The General Model

Human and animal behavior may be viewed as a circular process that involves perceiving, evaluating, reacting, and changes in the external world. Perceptions lead to actions, and actions change the environment; some of these changes are perceived, and these perceptions are the starting point of the next cycle. Behavior seldom consists of isolated responses to isolated stimuli; it is an ongoing interaction between an organism and its environment.

An organism also perceives its own movements. In this way, movements become recognizable units that may be combined and used intentionally. Recognized movements also may be used as a means to represent actions and situations. To a child playing with a box, that box may be a boat, a car, or a rabbit hutch. In this process, movements are the central factor, things are secondary: what a thing "is" depends on what the child is doing, the same "thing" may have different roles, depending on the nature of the game. This is the starting point of symbolic behavior.

At the next stage, a child acquires the ability to imagine things apart from actions. Gradually language begins to play an ever more important role in this process. In the theory of Jean Piaget, the beginning of play and symbolic behavior occurs at the age of about two years, and marks the transition from the sensorimotor stage to the stage of preoperational thought. From the age of about six years, a child is able to imagine things apart from movements. The use of abstract concepts and relations starts at about twelve years.

This model is summarized in figure 1. Human behavior is a circular process which can be short-circuited at different levels. At first, the circle consists of perceptions, reactions, and perceptions of the results of these actions. At the next stage, a child perceives, recognizes and reacts to his own movements. The same thing may have different meanings in different situations. At the third level, a child is able to picture things to himself and to imagine what will happen if he acts in a certain way. At the fourth level, a person is able to talk about things and to draw conclusions from his own words. Abstract thinking to a large extent depends on language.

Playing takes its structure from actual movements and situations; imagination takes its structure from actual situations and playing. Language has its own grammar and syntax, but it represents the structure of actual happenings, playing, and imagined situations. Playing and imagination are processes an organism may develop by and for itself, but language presupposes a speech community.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Language

Before the beginning of language, a baby discovers that she can use her voice to make many kinds of sounds. At the same time, she hears sounds and learns to associate them with persons and situations. Among these sounds, of course, are words and parts of sentences. Language starts when the child discovers she can imitate some of these sounds, and that her environment reacts enthusiastically. From this point on, language becomes a means of contact and, eventually, mutual understanding.

These first words usually occur sometime near a child's first birthday. From an adult point of view, they are isolated words. To the child they are still at the same level as non-verbal forms of communication, such as smiling, crying, waving etc. They operate in the same circle of I-react-to-you-and-you-react-to-me.

At about two years, a child starts using sentences consisting of two words. Words become recognizable units that may be combined, and a child can make up statements she has never heard before. At the age of two and a half years most children start using longer sentences. At the age of six a child has mastered the fundamentals of the system.

Elements of Reading and Writing

When a child starts reading and writing, he has to isolate words from the ongoing process of communication, and he has to view words as patterns of sounds. Recognizing sounds is difficult. Sounds in a word are not separate units following each other, but movements merging into each other. Every sound is influenced by the preceding and the following sounds. Linguists describe these processes in terms of phonemes and allophones, but children have to solve the puzzle at the perceptual level. When you have reliable kinesthetic feedback and can feel your own speech movements you know implicitly how speech sounds merge. Without this feedback a child may recognize and understand words, but not be able to divide them into separate sounds.

When reading aloud, you have to translate signs into articulations. You must recognize signs and associate them with movements of your tongue, lips, vocal cords etc. Without kinesthetic feedback, these patterns of movements are not recognizable units. A child may know the signs but there is no experience or thing to connect them with as yet; it is like building a bridge with no point of support on the other shore. When reading silently, a child has to translate signs into imagined speech movements, but these also depend on felt movements for their development.

When writing (or typing), you have to translate sounds and words into movements of your fingers. For most people, letters and common words correspond to familiar and habitual movements. But if you have poor kinesthetic feedback and do not quite feel and recognize your finger movements, you cannot associate sounds or words with your movements. Once more, you are building a bridge without any support on the other side. A child may have to hunt for each separate sign in her visual memory, time and again, and each time she must decide how to draw the shape or sign she remembers. This takes so much time it is difficult or impossible think about spelling or sentence construction as well.

The ability to feel and recognize your own movements plays a crucial role at several points in the process of reading and writing. Kinesthetic feedback is implicit, preverbal, "at the silent level," but it is an indispensable link in recognizing speech sounds and in writing. This leads to my working hypothesis that there exists a relationship between a lack of kinesthetic feedback and reading problems.

Mesker's Test

In my work with dyslexic children, I use a test developed by the Dutch neurologist Professor P.M. Mesker (1972). For this test, the subject sits before a blackboard placed in the sagittal plane (i.e., in line with his nose), so he is able to see one side of the board only with the left eye and the other side only with his right eye. The subject then copies a standard series of loops and curlicues with both hands simultaneously, working with the left hand on one side of the board and the right hand on the other side.

The original aim of the test is to asses hand preference and the coordination of left and right. There are several studies showing a relationship between bimanual coordination and dyslexia (e.g. Badian and Wolff, 1977, and Gladstone, Best and Davidson, 1989). However, Mesker's test also has to do with the coordination of making a movement, feeling that movement, and using these perceptions in executing the next phase of the movements. They are not the same movements a pupil uses when talking or writing, but they form a similar feedback loop.

For about twenty years, I classified pupils according to their scores on Mesker's test, and I analyzed their scores on a number of reading and spelling tests. Groups scoring high on Mesker's test consistently show the same factor pattern, but groups with lower scores show different patterns every time. There are no differences in their reading or spelling scores; all pupils I see are referred because of reading and or spelling problems. However, pupils with a relatively well-developed kinesthetic feedback system all tend to use the same reading technique. Pupils with lower scores for motor development and kinesthetic feedback use different techniques. My data on pupils tested from 2002 to 2004 are fairly typical.

Motor Development and Reading Strategies: Test and Experimental Groups

This group consisted of 135 pupils from secondary schools, most of them in the first year (about ninth grade). Their ages ranged from 11 to 14 years. They were tested on the request of their schools or their parents because of reading problems. Using the median score on Mesker's test as a cutting point, I divided this group into a high-scoring group (N=69) and a low-scoring group (N=66). For both groups I carried out a factor analysis on the scores on five reading and spelling tests. Three factors were computed, and a Varimax rotation was used. I used the following tests.

** Reading aloud: the pupil reads a text aloud; the score is the number of mistakes.

** The number of mistakes in short words (four letters or less): in this text, expressed as a percentage of the total number of mistakes. Short words typically are articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, and other elements which can be easily deduced from the sentence structure. A high percentage of short mistakes indicates a "guessing" strategy in reading (fast but sloppy).

** Reading speed: the number of words per minute in a second text read silently.

** Text comprehension: the number of episodes the pupil mentions when asked to retell this story immediately after reading it (the text consists of ten episodes).

** Spelling: the number of mistakes and corrections in a short dictation (20 words).

Motor Development and Reading Strategies: Results

The group scoring above the median shows the pattern I find regularly in groups with higher scores on Mesker's test. Reading aloud, reading speed, and spelling have high loadings on the first factor. Apparently, these pupils use one single system that enables them to read and write words correctly and to recognize them quickly. This strategy may be used more or less effectively, but it operates as a coherent system of habits and abilities. The second factor is related to the percentage of mistakes in short words. The third factor is text comprehension.

In the group scoring below the median on Mesker's test, reading aloud, reading speed and spelling appear as three separate factors. The first factor includes reading aloud and text comprehension. Presumably, comprehension helps a pupil to recognize words correctly. The second factor includes reading speed and mistakes in shorter words; for this group reading speed seems to be related to sloppy reading. The third factor is spelling; knowledge of the spelling does not seem to help these pupils to recognize words more quickly or more correctly.

As mentioned earlier, groups scoring above the median on Mesker's test have the same factor pattern for as long as I have used these five test scores (since 1980; reading texts and dictations have been adjusted over the years). Groups having lower scores on Mesker's test have a different outcome every time. My conclusion is that pupils with better kinesthetic feedback tend to develop the same reading style. Presumably, non-dyslexic readers use the same strategy, only more effectively. Reading and spelling are aspects of the same process. Groups with lower scores use strategies which may differ from pupil to pupil. There is no consistent relation between reading and spelling, and the outcome of factor analysis depends on random fluctuations in group composition.

Motor Development and Reading Strategies: Conclusions

Kinesthetic feedback, the ability to perceive and recognize your own movements, is at the base of playing and symbolic behavior. It is crucial for linguistic development, especially at the point of combining words into sentences. It plays an important role in reading and writing. When you cannot feel your own articulation movements it becomes more difficult to recognize speech sounds. When you cannot feel your own finger movements, you cannot easily associate words or sounds with writing movements.

In this investigation I used Mesker's test as a measure of kinesthetic feedback. Pupils with higher scores on this test had a different style of reading than pupils who had lower scores on Mesker's test. Pupils with different reading styles may make the same number of mistakes in a reading test, but pupils with higher scores tend to use a unified strategy. Word recognition, reading speed, and spelling are aspects of the same process. In groups scoring lower on Mesker's test, reading has no consistent relation to spelling.

The style of reading has implications for treatment. For some children, training in spelling might lower the number of mistakes in reading, for other children the number of mistakes is related (inversely) to text comprehension. Furthermore, there is always a choice between helping a pupil to use an existing strategy more effectively and helping him to acquire a more effective reading style.

In my experience, exercises to improve motor coordination and kinesthetic feedback may help a pupil to develop a more unified strategy (i.e. a system in which correct reading goes together with reading speed and correct spelling). Since the times of Grace Fernald and Samuel Orton, tracing of words or letters has been used as a means for teaching reading and writing to dyslexic children. These methods could (and should) be combined with training in sensory awareness.

Finally, it would be interesting to know if other tests of motor development show similar relationships to reading style. It would be interesting to know whether tests for kinesthetic feedback and awareness of the silent levels show any relationship to semantic tests (for instance the Uncritical Inference Test).

REFERENCES

Badian, N.A., and Wolff, P.H. "Manual Asymmetries of Motor Sequencing in Boys with Reading Disabilities." Cortex 1977 (134) pp.343-349.

Gladstone, M., Best, T.C., Davidson, R.J. "Anomalous Bimanual Coordination among Dyslexic Boys." Developmental Psychology, 1989 (25) pp.236-246.

Mesker, P.M. De menselijke hand. Nijmegen 1972 (description of the test in English, pp.102-113).

An extended report on my research on reading strategies and motor development until 2004) can be found on www.stichtinghulpbijdyslexie.nl (Dutch language).

CORNELIS WEGGELAAR*

* Cornelis Weggelaar (Kees to his friends) studied psychology at the Leyden University. Since 1975, he has tested and assisted pupils of secondary schools with reading and spelling problems. Together with Dr. Christine Kuipers, he published several books and articles on dyslexia. Until last summer, he was a teacher at the Alkmaar School of Higher Education, and he helped to organize the Stichting Hulp bij Dyslexie (Assistance-for-Dyslexia Foundation). He has written several articles for ETC, including "Whorf's Hypothesis: The Case of Dutch and English" in the Winter 1982 issue.