Information processing framework

I applied in 1980 to the Medical Research Council of the UK for funds to support a two-year study of the ‘Cognitive basis of spelling disability’. The raison d’etre of this project was the observation, made by Critchley (1970 ), Miles (1983 ) and others, that dyslexic children often give evidence of cognitive disturbances other than difficulties with reading and spelling. These particularly affect the conceptualisation of space and time and are apparent as confusions between right and left, poor understanding of compass point direction, difficulty in learning to read the clock, poor mastery of the time labelling sequences (the days of the week or the months of the year) and problems in learning other conventional sequences such as the alphabet or the arithmetical tables. At the time that I made the proposal to the Medical Research Council it seemed to me possible that these areas of spatial and temporal knowledge might share with the storage of spelling a dependence on certain fundamental structures required for the coding of position, adjacency and direction within ordered arrays of elements, and that dyslexic problems stemmed from a disturbance of this representational system.