Disortography: Symptoms, Types, Causes and Treatments

The disortography is a language disorder of the same family of disorders as dyslexia. However, this particular disorder mainly affects writing, being the people who suffer it unable to write words orthographically adequate.

A text written by a person with dystortography will be full of several mistakes and grammatical errors, which are committed repeatedly and whose explanation does not have to do with the intellectual abilities of the person. One of the most typical errors of a person with disortography is the forgetting of some letters within a word.

They also tend to present an incorrect diacritics, confusion of some sounds when writing or incorrect application of grammar rules. Although there is still no consensus on the best way to treat this disorder, in recent decades treatments have been developed to minimize its negative effects.

symptom

Until the introduction of the DSM - V (the most recent psychological disorders manual), disortography did not differ in academic circles from other problems of development such as dysgraphia.

However, thanks to the new classification, today we can diagnose disortography as a language disorder independent of the rest. In this section we will see in more detail what its main symptoms are.

Deficit in knowledge and use of spelling rules

The main symptom that a person with dystortography presents is the difficulty to understand and use the proper spelling of their language in an appropriate way.

People with this disorder are wrong when writing words, either in minor aspects such as tildes or more serious, as the letters by which they are formed.

Deficit in reading

Because they do not master writing or spelling, people with dystortography have problems reading a text.

Depending on the severity of their symptoms, they may become unable to understand the words in front of them.

Slow at the time of writing

Because they do not master the rules of writing well, children with dystortography are not able to improve in this field.

While other people increase their writing speed over the years, those who suffer from this disorder will continue to maintain a very slow pace unless they receive treatment.

Confusion in the conversion of phonemes to graphemes

Some of the sounds of each language have a very similar pronunciation. Therefore, one of the most important tasks of a person who is learning to write is to distinguish them in order to represent them properly in a text.

However, the person with dystortography may not be able to transform the phonemes to graphemes properly.

Types

Disortography is a specific language disorder that belongs to a wider group of reading and writing difficulties known as"dysgraphia." However, it is also possible to divide the disortography into several types depending on what the present symptoms are, as well as their severity.

Basically, we can distinguish between two main types of disortography: natural disortography and arbitrary disortography.

Natural disortography

Disortography is considered to be natural type when it mainly affects phonological development; that is, the inability of the person to spell a word and discover why phonemes are formed.

On the other hand, it may also have to do with the rules of conversion from phoneme to grapheme. A person presenting this symptom would confuse the way of representing in writing some phonemes, changing for example a"v"for a"b".

Arbitrary disortography

On the other hand, the disortography of arbitrary type affects mainly the knowledge and application of the orthographic rules in the written expression.

A person with this variant of the disorder can have problems in various fields of writing, from the use of tildes to the correct representation of each word.

Causes

As in the case of other specific language disorders such as dyslexia, the causes of the appearance of disortography can be multiple. Next we will see some of these.

Wrong learning of the rules of writing

It has been shown that the use of some methods used to teach reading and writing cause students to develop language disorders later in life. Although most of these methods are no longer used, people who were exposed to them may still have symptoms related to their use.

Brain disorder

Some of the people with disortography symptoms have developmental problems in some of the brain areas related to the language. This may be due to genetic or environmental factors, such as a traumatic brain injury or stroke.

Intellectual problems

Some intellectual problems can cause a person to develop disortography. Some of the most related to this disorder are the following:

- Low intellectual coefficient.

- Problems in visual perception.

- Deficiencies in space-time perception.

Treatments

As in the case of all other specific language disorders, people with dystortography need to receive treatment as soon as possible in order to overcome their symptoms.

Once a good diagnosis has been made to know in more depth what are the specific problems experienced by the person, the psychologist or educator in charge of the case must design a concrete action plan for the patient.

In the case of disortography, some of the actions that can be taken to improve the symptoms can range from the repeated practice of writing and spelling rules, to the teaching of tricks and techniques to remember the written form of words most used language.

On the other hand, while the treatment is being carried out, if the patient is in a situation in which his disorder causes him great harm (as in the case of a student), palliative remedies can be applied, such as audio recording. of the lessons or the substitution of written exams by others of an oral nature.

References

1. "Disorder of written expression"in: Psychodiagnosis. Retrieved on: 21 April 2018 from psicodiagnosis: psicodiagnosis.es.
2. "Dysorthography"in: Pensare Oltre. Retrieved on: 21 April 2018 from Pensare Oltre: pensareoltre.org.
3. "What is disortography?"In: Laterality. Retrieved on: April 21, 2018 from Lateralidad: lateralidad.com.
4. "What is disortography - Symptoms and treatments"in: Curious Universe. Retrieved into: 21 April 2018 from Curious Universe: icesi.edu.co.
5. "Disortografía"in: Wikipedia. Retrieved into: 21 April 2018 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.