Summer Research Roundup: Dyslexic Strengths

Today on Dyslexia Journey, we're going to do another research roundup, with today's focus being on dyslexic strengths.

Got me diagnosed when I was in third grade, and it was the most relieving day of my life, because I finally had like kind of a place to hang my hat and say, see, I told you, I'm not lazy, definitely not stupid. I just learned differently, like that's totally okay. Be dyslexics, we were often, you know, just set up for failure, because, you know, we were given books and tasks that really are not appropriate for the level that we were at.

So, how do you expect anyone to be open to learning, when their entire relationship with reading, with learning, is physical pain? Wish I had understood when I was younger that the fact that my brain worked differently than people meant that I would be good at things in ways that other kids were not going to be good at. I must assume, I can't be dyslexic, because letters don't jump off the downtrodden. Dyslexia is not a disorder. It is not a disease.

Once you sort of own it and embrace it, then you can have the power to deal with it. It's sort of empowering, and also enriching to the whole community. To those who don't understand what dyslexia is, that it's not a negative, it's not a problem, it's, like we keep saying, superpower.

Hey, everyone, we're Nick and Sonja, and this is Dyslexia Journey. And today, we are going to take a look at a couple of articles again, as periodically we do what we call a research roundup of research on dyslexia. Today, it's one study and one literature review, which means it's looking at results from multiple studies and making some conclusions based on that. So, without further ado, I will get into the first study here.

Let me tell you the name, first of all. So, it is called A Semantic Strength and Neural Correlates in Developmental Dyslexia, published in Frontiers in Psychology. And I should say both of these are pretty recent. This one's especially recent. It was published just in February of the year we're recording this, which is 2025. And it was by Slajana Lukic, or Lukic? I'm sorry, I'm not sure how to pronounce it at all.

And so, just really quickly, since we said semantic strength, semantics is a general knowledge of concepts and or word meanings. So, just so you have that vocabulary at hand, they're talking about meaning of words and concepts when they say semantics. Okay, so this study tested 97 English-speaking dyslexic children between ages 8 and 13. No tests required reading or writing, however. But they were given semantic fluency and letter fluency tests. And then overall, these results, and remember, this was just dyslexic kids between 8 and 13 who were being looked at here.

Overall, there were means of 77.3 percentile on the semantic fluency and 34.67 on letter fluency. And, you know, it was a good study in the sense they really did control things like demographics. But it's a little more complicated than this because then, so they not only got that result in the study, but they also did fMRI studies, which means, so MRIs you might, you know, know of as one of the ways we sort of look at the organs.

And we can, you can get a picture of inside the body, like, including looking at soft tissue with an MRI. And fMRI is functional magnetic resonance imaging. So, it's going to show you, like, where certain kinds of activity are happening as well. And so, they did fMRI studies as well with these same participants. And they were divided into two groups based on the semantic fluency results. So, there were, so whether they were in, where they'd gotten a high score on the semantic fluency or whether they got an average on the semantic fluency.

It was to try to see, like, perhaps get some clues as to what this potential strength in semantic fluency might be about. And so, what they found, and I'll just quote this, is, quote, the high semantic fluency group had more switches between brain states compared to the average semantic fluency group indicating more efficient brain function. So, what they're saying there is that they thought that they could see in the higher, the people who'd done higher in the semantic fluency on the test, that they could see that their brains were working more efficiently from this, these fMRI studies.

So, they were trying to take sort of this initial result and see potential causes that they might be seeing. But the question here is, what is the cause and what's the effect, right? Yeah. And let me set aside the cause and effect for a second. I wanted to make kind of a general comment about this. Sure. There's kind of, like, two different results here. One is that it just, if we think about it, those of us who are familiar with dyslexic kids, we know that they are often quite intelligent.

And understanding, even a lot of people think that dyslexic kids are not going to be good at language, just overall, right? And those of us who are around dyslexic kids know that dyslexic kids can be quite good at language. And so, what I really like about this study is that it was trying to tease apart the semantics of language from the, I guess, the process of reading. The process of reading, right.

So, the meaning versus, like, actually the process of reading. Yeah. And so, the semantic versus the letter fluency really did tease that apart. And this random sample, I think random sample, actually, I should double check that. Yeah, I don't know for sure. I don't know, yeah. We'll put the link to the study below. So, if you want to delve into any aspects of the study more. Okay. I will say controlled study, let me say it that way, did show that the, it was only dyslexic kids.

And they had an average of, I think, 77th percentile on semantic fluency, which means that, on average, they did better than 77 out of 100 people from the general population. Right. Because these, they gave them standard tests that can be scaled to, that have been standardized on the general population. Right. That's how they can compare it. And then just to clarify again, I sort of said this already, but you don't know how clear it comes across.

So, then from, from all those people who took the test, they took, because not all of them, right, were the ones who'd done as well. So, they pulled, like, the ones who were the high on semantic fluency, even from within this group of dyslexic kids, to look, to compare the average ones with the high ones for that, for the functional part. And that's where they found the actual brain difference, or brain functional differences.

Yeah. If there was functional, not structural. And we've talked before, I will say, so, so we're about to talk about what's the cause and what's the effect. So, is it, what does it really mean, like, in terms of, like, does it mean there's this brain difference to start, or is it the other way? We'll talk about that in a second. But I will say that in a different article that we've covered before, they have found brain differences, otherwise, in dyslexic brains, like, in terms of the column differences.

Actual structural. Yeah, actual structural differences that we will link our previous video that we did on that, like, that includes that information. But it's, so it's, so it's definitely possible, like, that that's, that that is a cause, and it's actually a functional difference right from the beginning based on structure. Yeah. Yeah, so just, I guess, to summarize, it's, like, two really separate findings, almost, to think about. One is that, like, dyslexic kids can be good at language and understanding the meaning of words.

Right. That's, like, maybe the number one thing you should take away from. Right, right. And then the second is this really interesting, actually, functional difference in the people who had the highest semantic understanding. Right. And so, some things to consider. So, so when we said, what is the cause, what's the effect? So, so, of course, one possibility is it is the cause, and it's structural, and that's what's causing the functional difference.

However, it's also possible that, because dyslexic kids often are compensating, so it's also possible that they are compensating such that, you know, and when you compensate, you're using your brain, right? So that they're creating that functional difference just in how they're using their brain and how they're strengthening certain connections and that kind of thing. Yeah. Simply from compensating. And the study authors did propose that as a hypothesis. Right. So that's also possible, too.

So, so it's important to keep that in mind as well. It's not like we know exactly, but it's still really interesting just to see that. And it does seem to be a strength that we can point to among dyslexic kids. And I think sometimes, you know, anecdotally, sometimes, like, I think if we look closely, we can see that they understand meaning well. However, sometimes that can get a little confused with the fact that sometimes they don't read as much.

It just varies, right? Like, different kids are different, or are they listening to, you know, audiobooks or whatever to get the same information. But sometimes, like, vocabulary or something won't be, won't be as strong as dyslexic kids simply because they're not getting as much exposure. But that's not really the same thing. Like, we're talking more about the skill, the conceptual skill, really. So, so I just wanted to point that out. So if you have an individual case where you're like, well, but they don't know very many meanings of words, that's not like exactly the same thing here.

So, right. We shouldn't confuse capability with, with knowledge. Right. Right. Exactly. So anyway, that's our first one. And then the second, I'll let Nick go through the second literature review or start going through it. I guess it's pretty long. So we'll probably both cover it. But the second article that we're going to talk about also is really focused on dyslexic strengths here. So let's go ahead and talk about that one. Yeah.

So the title of this one is cognitive strengths in neurodevelopmental disorders, conditions and differences, a critical review by Catherine J. Ma, Jeff Beattie and Edwin Burns. It was published in the journal Neuropsychologia on May 3rd of 2024. So a little over a year ago is the time that we're recording this. And I was really impressed by this literature review because they were very thorough.

And they, it's interesting because they were looking for strengths. And so I just want to read one quote from the paper where they say, quote, such strengths have to be identified in a close reading of papers that typically focus on deficit. So what they mean by that is that most research on dyslexia has not focused on strengths. And if there are strengths discovered, it's often maybe an ancillary finding that is not the main point of the paper.

And so in order to find the strengths in the existing research studies that are out there, they had to look at a lot of the published papers and read them very closely, not just read the abstract for the key findings. Right. So it's not like they would have just gone for, because if you remember that first study I said, actually said the word dyslexia. They were not doing that. They were looking at many studies just all about dyslexia and then trying to find within them, but careful reading what the strengths were.

And actually this literature review is even more impressive because they also covered autism, ADHD, and maybe at least one other condition. Oh, wow. That's huge. I didn't even know that. Yeah. No, definitely a lot of work was put into that paper. And so our appreciation goes to the authors on that. So we're going to try to summarize that the, well, so we're going to summarize their summary of what they discovered of overall trends on strengths and dyslexia that have been, written about in, scientific articles.

so the, and I think they, they kind of went in order of, evidence for this. And so it seems like the most overwhelming evidence is for creativity. There've been a fair amount of studies about this. and the, I guess, let me just read you a quote actually. So they say dyslexic adults consistently performing better in tasks requiring novelty, insight, and innovative styles of thinking. so that's one category of kind of strength that they found during this literature review.

Yeah. And so like one way that they. Is creativity in these ways. Yeah. And one way that researchers have studied creativity is just asking people to name, like, how many different ways can you use an everyday object like a brick? so this gets sort of out of the box thinking and things like that. and so dyslexic adults, consistently perform better on those types of tasks than non-dyslexic adults. Mm-hmm. Interestingly. Mm-hmm. I was very clear to say adults because the research on kids is actually a little more ambiguous.

the, according to the authors of this paper, there's less evidence or, I guess superior creative thinking in dyslexic kids than there is in dyslexic adults. Mm-hmm. And it's interesting to speculate why that might be. I think they propose that maybe, I can't remember if the authors of this paper proposed it or if they were quoting, a, a possible, hypothesis from a different paper that they reviewed. But one idea is that they said that, perhaps, dyslexic people, it takes them a while to gain the skills to allow them to demonstrate the creativity.

Right. So they can demonstrate it better as adults. Right. Yeah. All right. So that, so that's one big category is creativity. That includes art, but it also includes like what we're saying, creative problem solving and creative thinking. So another big category, which may not surprise any of you is visual spatial ability. So that was the other, another big category that they were looking at, or that they found and then investigated further.

So one of the ways that this was demonstrated was something called the impossible, impossible illusion task, which is identifying 2d images of 3d objects that can't actually exist in real life. Which to be honest with you, when I read this, I still can't quite, I still don't know what they're talking about. Cause it's such a visual thing. They have an image in the paper. but, we'll link to the paper. I keep trying to imagine what this is and I just can't quite grasp it, but I think I would need the visual to do it.

But in any case, like they were able to do this, you know, this complex imaging in their minds of 3d objects that are impossible just based on two or 2d. I don't know. I'm doing it backwards again. Anyway, the point is they could do this, 3d and 2d thing that was called the impossible illusion task. Okay. So, so also there were enhanced visual processing abilities. And an example of this would be identifying black holes in astronomy photos.

and then they just made the point that these kinds of skills are useful for radiology. So that would be like, you know, looking at, x-rays or other imaging, like we talked about MRIs and stuff. Cause you have to, you have to have the sense when you're looking at that 2d, that 2d, picture, like have a sense of what the 3d really is. That's being imaged. so, so radiology astronomy, of course, cause we just mentioned the black holes and those astronomy photos.

And they also mentioned cellular microscopy as well. and a possible mechanism that they proposed was that dyslexic, dyslexics have strong peripheral vision and visual comparison skills. So, I mean, who knows? There's probably a lot to it. I mean, I, to me, I guess, well, creativity too. Like both of these, like are so holistic too. There's like multiple factors probably going into them. Which we talked about before actually in previous episodes, how, sort of holistic thinking and using, sort of, combining, yeah, different parts of the brain functioning, is a strength of dyslexia in general.

So, but it's still, it's still interesting to tease out these pieces that are sort of like functional or structural differences that have been seen and see how they, it seems like they connect. But it's probably important to keep in mind that a lot of things kind of like with genetics and how, you know, often things are multifactorial with that. And there's all kinds of different genes playing in. There's probably multiple things playing in, possibly even things that are none of these, like the overall holistic thinking.

So there's probably multiple factors, but it is interesting to see the, to see the threads in there. Yeah. And in terms of the, the imaging, one thing I just thought of is, our dyslexic daughter always tells us that when trying to read a page of words, she sees the whole page at the same time. Mm-hmm. And so that is, that makes reading difficult, but it makes analyzing images probably easier. Right. And I wonder if that's what they mean, actually.

I wasn't quite sure what they meant by visual comparison, but I wonder if sort of that's what they mean, like sort of the patterns in their whole image. I wasn't exactly sure what they meant by that, but, yeah. Anyway. Yeah. So visual, so visual spatial ability is this whole category here that they also found when they're looking at this literature review. So, so, so basically, and this isn't like quantified, but, but in, in the authors of this paper in, in terms of, or at least they didn't quantify it in this paper.

But according to their literature review, there is clear evidence that dyslexics have, you know, are, have superior strengths compared to the general population in both creativity and visual spatial skills. Right. Right. So how about math? Because we often think of dyslexic kids also going into things like engineering. So let's find out what they've done. Yeah. So what they found out in their literature review is that, dyslexics are neither superior to nor inferior to the general population in math on average.

There's obviously outliers in all populations. Right. this is interesting. And they actually made a point in this paper to say that we don't talk about findings where things are like equal. Right. Like that enough. Right. Yeah, because yeah, but it is interesting because it's also meaningful to know that like to me that immediately generates questions about, oh, well, so that's interesting. Is the engineering really more about the visual spatial skills or some other aspect?

Right. Because I do think that it's true that there's maybe a higher representation or, but, but who knows what's the cause? Right. Maybe it's because sometimes they're frustrated by, by fields, you know, maybe they enjoy those fields more because some of those other fields are more frustrating. Maybe it's because, because of the visual spatial skills. Like, I mean, there could be multiple reasons. It's just speculation, but I do think it's interesting because, you know, if I were to have guests just because of knowing that about often dyslexics going into engineering, I, I, I would have probably said maybe they were, would be a little higher in math.

But I mean, it also makes sense that they're, they're not, I mean, they're the same. They're the same. Yeah. Yeah. I guess one caveat I thought I'd make about all of this, whenever we're talking about studies with findings like this, or at least unless we're talking about case studies, this is, averages for the population. And so it, it doesn't mean anything about an individual person, right? So like, it's important because you don't want to make any assumptions.

So, so it's, it's generally, you know, how it's generally going to show up as a, a bell curve. And so, you know, you've got, you're going to have, a dyslexic person who is not very good at visual spatial abilities and you can have a non-dyslexic person who's very good at visual spatial abilities. Like it doesn't, it doesn't mean that every individual person is going to fit exactly, in the, the sort of averages.

Right. Exactly. So hopefully that was interesting for you. Like I said, we'll put the studies, below the links to the studies, if you want to peruse them further. and if you have any studies you notice, you know, and you want us to cover, definitely let us know. You can put it in the comments if you're looking at this on YouTube or you could email us. Yeah. parenting Dyslexia Journey at gmail.com. and we'd love to hear your, just anecdotally what your dyslexic kids are, are what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are.

you know, whether they fit these trends or not, we're curious to know. And we also are always curious to hear what other topics you want us to cover, or if you have any particular questions, we sometimes also do sort of a roundup of, of viewer and listener questions as well sometimes. So thanks everyone.