Many children with poor eye movement skills and lack of visual dominance have trouble with complicated verbal instructions and express themselves poorly verbally, and they are often diagnosed with receptive and/or expressive language problems. Poorly developed visual thinking skills are often the cause of these language problems. These children attempt to remember spoken words in sequence rather than the more efficient visual thinking process of converting what they hear into imagery so that they can store the information and retrieve it when they need it. As with all of the other problems discussed in this report, this problem is caused by a deflected thinking pattern which is illustrated in the figures below.
Children with receptive/expressive language problems often don’t convert information that they hear into imagery because they are too busy trying to remember all of the words that they heard. Brain studies show less activity in the pre-front cortex of the brain (which, as you recall, is associated with mental imagery)
when a child is trying to remember spoken words rather than visualizing what has been said and understanding it. The following fMRI (functional MRI) shows reduced activity in the pre-frontal cortex in the upper right corner and appropriate pre-frontal cortex activity when the child is visualizing the content of what has been said rather than remembering the words.
Please be aware that this difference is not caused by an abnormal brain structure which is often the basis for labels such as dyslexia and ADHD but because the child is engaged in a different way of thinking and processing information which is much less efficient. These children do not have abnormal brains, but they are using their brains abnormally.
