The followings are the behavioral characteristics of dyslexic individuals from different age groups

1. Preschool Children

(Excerpt from ‘ The Hong Kong Learning Behavior Checklist for Preschool Children (Parent Version))

  • Mis-pronunciation of words, especially those similar in pronunciation. E.g. wrongly pronounced initial consonant /t/ as /d/; or, the word ‘chicken’ (gai1) as ‘turtle’ (gwai1).
  • Inability in naming common objects or colors.
  • Frequently mix up the sequence of sentences or words.
  • Compared to same-age children, take longer time and effort in learning nursery rhymes but forget them easily.
  • Compared to same-age children, take longer time in recognizing Chinese characters and English alphabets but forget them easily.
  • Favor listening to stories over learning words.
  • Inability in remembering their birth dates, address or phone number.
  • Inability in following directional instructions such as ‘move forward and turn left

2. Primary school students

(Excerpt from ‘The Hong Kong Behavior Checklist for Specific Learning Difficulties in Reading and Writing for Primary School Students (Second Edition) Manual (BCL-P(II)’)

  • Difficulty in getting the key message of a passage.
  • Can barely express thoughts in writing, and there are grammatical mistakes.
  • Verbal expression is much better than written expression.
  • Difficulty in spotting mistakes from their own piece of work.
  • Better performance in speech comprehension than in reading comprehension.
  • Difficulty in reconstructing sentences.
  • Cannot write the vocabularies but can use them properly in speech.
  • Poor idea and organization in writing.

3. Secondary school students

(Excerpt from ‘The Hong Kong Behavior Checklist for Specific Learning Difficulties in Reading and Writing for Junior Secondary School Students (BCL-JS)’)

  • Confuse words that are similar in structure, pronunciation and meaning.
  • Difficulty in recognizing common characters/words.
  • Skip lines or words when reading aloud a passage.
  • Compared to same-age students, take a longer time in comprehending a passage.
  • Poor performance in Chinese dictation.
  • Compared to same-age students, easily make mistakes in writing Chinese characters with many strokes.
  • Speaking is better than writing.
  • Wrong usage of punctuation (e.g. frequent comma splice)

4. Adults

(Excerpt from ‘The Hong Kong Reading and Writing Behavior Checklist for Adults’.)

  • Difficulty in recognizing Chinese characters learned or commonly used.
  • Frequent addition or omission of characters/words in reading Chinese.
  • Mix up words with similar pronunciation.
  • Take a longer time to read and comprehend a passage, or need to read many times to understand it.
  • Frequent addition or omission of characters in copying Chinese, or write the wrong words.
  • Perform much better in speaking than in writing.
  • Frequently lose personal belongings (e.g. wallets and keys).
  • Difficulty in memorizing the Multiplication Table or mathematical equations.