Short answers, pulled from the story.
Dyslexia is a learning disability that impairs accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. Its core deficit is phonological awareness, the ability to identify, manipulate, and remember the sound structures of language. People with dyslexia may struggle to sound out words, segment them into individual sounds, or read quickly, even when their general intelligence is typical.
Dyslexia affects an estimated 3-7% of the population, though up to 20% of people may have some degree of its symptoms. It is the most common learning disability and occurs in all areas of the world. While it is diagnosed more often in males, some researchers suggest the condition affects men and women equally, with a referral bias in diagnosis partly accounting for the difference.
Dyslexia was clinically described by Oswald Berkhan in 1881. The term dyslexia was coined in 1883 by Rudolf Berlin, an ophthalmologist in Stuttgart, to describe a boy with severe reading and writing difficulties who showed typical intelligence in all other respects. In 1896, British physician W. Pringle Morgan of Seaford, East Sussex, published a description of a reading-specific learning disorder in the British Medical Journal under the title "Congenital Word Blindness."
Several genes have been linked to dyslexia, including DCDC2 and KIAA0319 on chromosome 6, and DYX1C1 on chromosome 15. Research into genetic causes grew from post-autopsy examinations of dyslexic brains, which revealed microscopic cortical malformations called ectopias, along with abnormal cortical development thought to occur before or during the sixth month of fetal brain development.
No. Languages with shallow orthographies, where letters map closely to sounds, such as Spanish, Italian, and Finnish, are easier for people with dyslexia to read than languages with deep orthographies like English and French. Spanish-speaking children with dyslexia show higher performance in reading nonsense words than English-speaking children. Logographic systems such as Chinese characters present a different kind of challenge, with readers needing to connect symbols directly to meanings rather than converting letters to sounds.
Dyslexia has no cure, but early educational intervention can reduce reading failure. The most effective approach builds a child's awareness of the correspondence between written letters and spoken sounds, with reinforced training in both reading and spelling together showing longer-lasting gains than phonological work alone. Specially designed fonts such as Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic have not been found effective in research; standard fonts like Times New Roman and Arial perform equally well.