Dyslexia : At What Age Can You Do An Evaluation?
Children as young 3:6 years of age can undergo early literacy assessments in order to determine their potential risk of developing literacy deficits when older. However, to be tested and diagnosed with a learning impairment in reading and writing (dyslexia) a student needs to be at least 6 years and 6 months to 7 years of age. This is equivalent to second semester of 1st grade or second grade. By 3rd grade however, most students are expected to have met certain benchmarks through the Florida Standards Assessment (FSA).
Moreover, young children who display a pattern of linguistic difficulties during early development (delayed developmental milestones) are at higher risk for dyslexia. It is important to identify these risks to better plan their future literacy based interventions for optimal functional outcomes.
What should parents or caregivers be looking for? Here are the sequential developmental milestones to look out for:
- Exploration of the environment (early socio-emotional development)
- Play (continuation of socio-emotional development)
- Receptive Language
- Comprehension of words, phrases, sentences, stories
- Expressive Language
- Speaking single words, phrases, sentences, engaging in conversations, producing stories
- Social Emotional Development (Pragmatics) continues to be refined and becomes more sophisticated
- Reading words, sentences, short stories, chapter books, etc.
- Reading general topics
- Domain specific topics (science, social studies, etc)
- Spelling
- Writing
- Words, sentences, short stories, essays
Children with a history of language delay/disorder are at a significant risk of having the disorder turn into a learning disability when they’re older. Research has shown that if the child experiences any deficits in the foundational language areas such as listening and speaking, s/he will most certainly experience difficulties in more complex areas of language: reading, writing, and spelling.
But, how early can these children be assessed in order to better plan their future literacy based interventions for optimal functional outcomes? Below are some common early literacy assessments:
- The Auditory Skills Assessment (ASA) can be administered to children 3:6—6:11 years of age. Similarly, the Test of Auditory Processing Skills-3 (TAPS-3) begins at 4 years of age and covers several areas pertaining to phonological awareness including auditory discrimination of words, phonological segmentation, as well as phonological blending abilities.
- Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing-2 (CTOPP-2) for ages 4+ assesses such areas as:
Phonological Segmentation
Blending Words
Sound Matching
Initial, Medial and Final Phoneme Isolation
Blending Nonwords*
Segmenting Nonwords*
Memory for Digits
Nonword Repetition*
Rapid Digit Naming
Rapid Letter Naming
Rapid Color Naming
Rapid Object Naming
- Emerging Literacy & Language Assessment (ELLA) for children 4:6 years of age and older, assesses the following literacy related abilities:
Section 1 – Phonological Awareness and Flexibility assesses rhyming (awareness and production), initial sound identification, blending and segmenting sounds, words, and syllables, and deleting and substituting sounds in the initial and final positions of words.
Section 2 – Sign and Symbol Recognition and Interpretation assesses environmental symbol identification, letter-symbol identification, word reference association, and reading comprehension for one to three sentences.
Section 3 – Memory, Retrieval, and Automaticity assesses rapid naming, word associations (name items that start with the “S” sound), and story retell (includes three story levels based on the child’s age).
- The Phonological Awareness Test 2 (PAT 2), for children between 5:0-9:11 years of age, assess the following areas:
–Rhyming: Discrimination and Production—identify rhyming pairs and provide a rhyming word
–Segmentation: Sentences, Syllables, and Phonemes—dividing by words, syllables and phonemes
–Isolation: Initial, Final, Medial—identify sound position in words
–Deletion: Compound Words, Syllables, and Phonemes—manipulate root words, syllables, and phonemes in words
–Substitution With Manipulatives—isolate a phoneme in a word, then change it to another phoneme to form a new word
–Blending: Syllables and Phonemes—blend units of sound together to form words
–Graphemes—assess knowledge of sound/symbol correspondence for consonants, vowels, consonant blends, consonant digraphs, r-controlled vowels, vowel digraphs, and diphthongs
–Decoding—assess general knowledge of sound/symbol correspondence to blend sounds into nonsense words
–Invented Spelling (optional)—write words to dictation to show encoding ability
- Rapid Automatized Naming and Rapid Alternating Stimulus Test RAN/RAS tests can be administered starting from 5 years of age to assess the child’s word fluency skills. Decreased word fluency is a significant indicator of reading deficits, which is why this ability is very important to test.
In addition to the above assessments, there are several tests of early reading and writing abilities which are available for younger children with suspected literacy deficits
TERA-3: Test of Early Reading Ability–Third Edition: The Test of Early Reading Ability–Third Edition (TERA-3) assesses the emergent reading abilities of children starting from 3:6 years of age.
Test of Early Written Language, Third Edition (TEWL-3) assesses the emergent writing abilities of children starting from 4:0 years of age.
To reiterate, children as young 3:6 years of age can undergo early literacy assessments in order to determine their potential risk of developing literacy deficits when older. If you have further questions call us at (813)468-6528 for a consultation.
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