The book is not for academics: “It’s a crossover that could be used by parents, teachers and nurses,” Goswami says. And dyslexia feeds right into the giant realm that child psychology covers.
Dyslexia, she explains, has a bad reputation. For years, it was considered the learning difficulty for “middle-class mothers whose children weren’t as bright as they wished”. That’s not fair though, she is quick to say, as “first of all, it goes across all of the social classes. [It isn’t] linked to intelligence”.
This is the first untruth she is keen to break down. I ask whether she can explain, in layman’s terms, how dyslexia functions. “It’s something very specific about how your brain processes speech signals. That means you have a very specific learning difficulty. It’s found in every culture.”
The science behind dyslexia stretches far beyond a simplistic imagining of a miscomprehension of words, and an inability to write them down on paper.
“We discovered that dyslexia isn’t a visual disorder,” Goswami explains. “It’s a language disorder. The way language is heard by children with dyslexia is subtly different to the way the rest of us hear language.”
It is the process in which the brain moves sounds into words that causes the problem. “When a speech signal comes into the brain, the sound is a pressure wave, and the energy in that pressure wave fluctuates,” Goswami says.
“Those fluctuations in energy carry speech rhythms – every time [you] stress a syllable, there will be more intensity coming into the brain; a word like 'baby’ has a strong first syllable and a weaker second syllable.”
And what happens is that those “modulations and changes in energy” fail to sync up with the neurons that send electrical signals in the brain. “The brain rhythms line themselves up with the speech rhythms and code the signal, and that process doesn’t work properly in dyslexia.”
It all sounds so simple, put that way.
But for a non-neurological expert – or one without a professor at the end of the phone – dyslexia might not sound so straightforward. The uninitiated might also ask if it is hereditary. “It is genetically carried, but not automatic,” Prof Goswami explains. “It’s more common in males, and we don’t yet understand why.”
The pastoral experience of dyslexia at school, and the social isolation that having the disorder can bring, can be confusing. Understanding the science can help.
The reason why dyslexics are often unable to spell well is “because [if] you can’t hear the same sound as other people are hearing, it’s very hard to know how to spell something”. Dyslexia is more than just an academic difficulty, but one that impacts the whole neural system.
Contrary to popular conception, dyslexia is “different from your innate intelligence”, Prof Goswami says. “It’s a sort of product of one particular bit of your brain and how it works.” She explains that the children who have been selected for help in her study have wide vocabularies in conversation, and understand what is being said to them.
“They’ve got good comprehension,” she says. “You don’t really know anything is wrong until they have to start thinking about sound patterning in words.”
And sound patterning is not something that we tend to make children think about, is it? “Normally we don’t think about it, we learn it implicitly, but when you have to reflect on it to acquire a character system, that’s when these children struggle.
"That’s one reason why [dyslexia] hasn’t been eliminated from the gene pool, because for a long time, before human culture invented writing systems, you didn’t need it.”
Little research has been done on bilingual dyslexia, but much more is known about the way that we understand learning languages.
“It’s not so bad if you’re born into a bilingual environment,” Prof Goswami says, “but it would be more if you were having to learn from scratch, and also from print, which isn’t a very natural way to acquire a language.”
Print is, of course, the way in which languages are taught in schools – for dyslexics, this is made all the more difficult. It is anecdotally accepted that the younger you are, the easier it is to learn a language, but Prof Goswami offers the real reason why.
“The brain is very plastic early in life and that’s when you’re doing all your initial learning. That’s why if you’re learning two or three languages as an infant, that’s fine, but it’s when you’re given the extra languages when you’re seven or eight, or 13 or 14, that it’s much tougher for the brain, because it’s already crystallised around one set of phonological and grammatical rules.”
But how can science work better with educators and parents to help children? “The most useful thing science could do – and we aren’t there yet – is to give a biographical marker,” Prof Goswami says.
Understanding the mechanisms that cause the disorder are most important. The sound energy fluctuations and the brain’s inability to work with these can relate to integral aspects of childhood, such as the first poems a child encounters.
“In nursery rhymes you have deliberate patterning, and that patterning which we find aesthetically appealing is carried by energy fluctuations.”
From this it follows that one way of helping potentially dyslexic children is to pump useful language patterns into the early years.
“Having a rich early repertoire of poetry, singing and musical remediation that’s always linked to language,” Prof Goswami says, is helpful, because “you’re matching syllable beat patterns to language before they start learning to read, to get their language systems in the same place as all the other children who are coming to school without this handicap.”
It is not, as one may suspect, about doing “more phonic drills – it’s actually in the stressed syllable patterning level which is reflected in speech rhythm”.
So then, dyslexia is about ears, and sounds and syllables – not just words on a page. But by the time a child has got to school, is it too late? “It’s never too late! We can always intervene in a trajectory – but the earlier the better.”
They say that prevention can sometimes be as good as a cure. While parents might not be able to tamper with every aspect of their child’s neuron function, it is possible to help at home in a way that might even be fun.
Child Psychology: a Very Short Introduction by Usha Goswami (OUP, rrp £7.99) is available from Telegraph Books: 0844 871 1514
Prof Usha Goswami is speaking at the Hay Festival on May 22 at 4pm on the Good Energy Stage