Readers with dyslexia struggle to learn to read words quickly and efficiently. While much attention has been given to the role of letter shapes, the best recognized difficulty is mapping letters to the sounds of language. While this is a challenge with every written language, it is particularly challenging with the English writing system. English has 26 letters representing approximately 45 sounds, and that mapping is not consistent. Vowels in particular can represent many sounds, such as different sounds made by the letter a in the words acorn, apple, and father. Pigs and Cups is a phonics intervention that adds an icon beneath each vowel letter to identify how the letter should be pronounced, similar in concept to diacritics in some writing systems. Each icon represents a unique sound. For example, the pig icon represents the short i sound that appears in the word pig. Young readers with dyslexia show excellent performance improvements in word recognition with Pigs and Cups compared to similar readers who get the same reading practice but without Pigs and Cups. There are real opportunities to design improvements to written text that can benefit readers with dyslexia. Phonics based improvements have a much larger effect than dyslexic fonts that have been designed to date, and likely benefit many additional readers including all early learners and readers learning a second language.
Pigs and Cups: Helping readers with dyslexia
