Dyseidesia / Dysphonesia

The dyseidesia / dysphonesia application is a dual iPad application, devised to determine at what level a child between the ages of 6 and 14 years is performing both eidetically and phonetically via the presentation of both phonetically regular and irregular words with increasing grade related levels of difficulty. The application requires 3 sessions each separated by 15 to 20 minutes, during which time other Vision Unlocked elements are assessed. We recommend starting your assessment with this application.

Dyseidesia - A dysfunction that involves whole word decoding is assessed by presenting randomly selected age appropriate words and displaying these for 2 seconds. This allows for whole word recognition ability but prevents effective phonetic decoding. Dyseidesia may benefit from visual perception therapy in association with continued educational instruction. Visual figure-ground, visual discrimination, and visual sequential memory all help dyseidesia.

Dysphonesia - A dysfunction where the primary problem is letter-sound, phoneme-sound integration is assessed by representing words failed during eidetic presentation for 10 seconds, allowing time for phonetic decoding.

Subsequent evaluation of phonetic encoding of unknown words allows the examiner to assess for reversals, short term memory and pen grip. The application will prompt the examiner to photograph the child’s pen grip and determine the closest description.

Later decoding of the child’s own phonetic encoding gives more clues to their ability to decode phonetically.

Knowing how a child approaches reading can allow the optometrist to give direction to parents and teachers where the child’s performance sits relative to age-based norms. Both observations and scoring is recorded by the application and these allow comprehensive analysis to be given in the vision report.