How Gifted Dyslexics Defy the Matthew Effect

What Reading Does for the Mind - and How Gifted Dyslexics Defy the Matthew Effect

By Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide

The "Matthew Effect" in reading (loosely the rich get richer, the poor get poorer) is the idea that individual who find it hard to read are likely to read less over time, resulting in poor levels of reading fluency (less practice) and lower vocabularies.

The link below is one of the classic papers from Cunningham and Stanovich, What Reading Does for the Mind. In the figure below, look at the differences in challenging vocabulary among the different types of material - printed text / books, newspapers / magazines, and children's books. But even among college educated students, spoken language is much simpler - really at the level of the preschool book!


Well, it's easy to understand why many young dyslexics gravitate away from reading and succumb to the Matthew Effect. They may find other things they do well, and decide that reading is just not for them. But if that choice is made early on and not challenged, it can also limit their future choices and put them on a track of verbal inferiority and embarrassment.

In our recent review of highly gifted dyslexics, we found a striking exception to the Matthew effect. In fact, when the I.Q scores of our gifted dyslexics (n = 15) were averaged, we found a surprisingly high distribution of verbal scores. Gifted dyslexics defy the Matthew Effect. When we looked closer at these students, too, we found that many of these students were in fact avid readers - although some admittedly were getting their rich verbal fare through books on tape. One Mom told us wearily, "He's almost addicted to having me read books to him!" Bravo for her!



I guess our takehome point is that it's essential to look for and foster gifted dyslexics' surprising verbal strengths - and parents, professionals, and the students themselves should not mistake the primary perceptual disorder of dyslexic (problems processing the sounds and sights of words) for a primary problem in language in general. It is no accident that there's a long list of dyslexics who go on to become famous writers.