Rapid Naming Dyslexia.(Dyslexia Awareness Month.)

 October is Dyslexia Awareness Month.

1 in 5 people has dyslexia.

This is our second email in our short but sweet email series on dyslexia.

Yesterday, you learned about Phonological Dyslexia.

Today is about Rapid Naming Dyslexia.

Rapid Naming Dyslexia:

Trouble Saying What They Know—Fast

This type of dyslexia is sneaky.

Your child might know the word, letter, or color… but can’t retrieve it quickly enough. 

These are often the kids who seem to take forever to read the next word.

It’s not a memory problem. 

It’s a processing speed issue.

What this can look like:

Pauses mid-sentence, trying to find the right word

Substitutes or skips over words

Slow reading speed

Uses “thing” or gestures instead of specific names

Struggles to keep up—even when they understand the material

6 Things you can do...

Rapid naming exercises with familiar categories (like shapes or colors)

Repeated reading to build fluency and retrieval speed

Reading fluency drills based on phonetic patterns

Multisensory activities that connect movement and speech

Use Tap-to-Read to help build retrieval speed

Water, sleep, and exercise

It's important to not forget about the basics. Your brain is made up of 73% water by weight and even a small amount of dehydration can affect cognitive performance. More and more research is also reminding us about the importance of sleep and how varied exercise also directly improves our brain health.

Here’s the encouraging part:

Both Phonological Dyslexia and Rapid Naming Dyslexia are very responsive to the right kind of intervention.

Stay tuned...

In our next email, we’ll explore Surface Dyslexia — when kids can't recognize common words at a glance.

You won’t want to miss it.

Talk soon,

Bonnie Terry, M.Ed., BCET

Board-Certified Educational Therapist

Co-founder of Scholar Within

Extra Credit—

Learn about the research behind Rapid Naming (also known as Rapid Automatic Naming or RAN):

The National Center for Biotechnology Information announced Stappen and Reybroeck’s results of their 2018 study on Rapid Automatized Naming and Phonological Awareness:

“The RAN intervention was found to be beneficial for the word reading speed.

This is consistent with numerous correlational findings showing that RAN was a strong predictor of reading speed (van den Bos et al., 2002; Savage and Frederickson, 2005; Tan et al., 2005; Landerl and Wimmer, 2008; Araújo et al., 2015; Georgiou et al., 2016).

However, this is the first time that the causal impact of RAN on reading speed is confirmed through an intervention design.

In the other causal direction, a recent study (Wolff, 2014) showed that a reading training, which included speeded exercises, could indirectly enhance RAN.

Those two pieces of evidence suggest a causal and reciprocal relationship between RAN and reading speed.

Furthermore, the results revealed that the efficacy of our intervention occurred in the long run (i.e., 6 months after the intervention), and highlighted for the first time that such training was widely beneficial for reading achievement.

These findings open up new perspectives for the prevention and remediation of reading disabilities.”