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Franck Ramus, Should there really be a ‘Dyslexia debate’?, Brain, Volume 137, Issue 12, December 2014, Pages 3371–3374, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awu295
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As its name suggests, the book The Dyslexia Debate by Julian Elliott and Elena Grigorenko aims to generate a debate on the concept of developmental dyslexia. Contrary to some misguided detractors of dyslexia (see text box below) these authors do not attempt to deny the existence of children with a specific reading disorder, nor do they deny that it has a strong underlying biological basis, even less do they try to convince the reader that dyslexia is just an excuse for bad teaching or a synonym of social disadvantage. Indeed, they can be commended for being very up-to-date on current research on the topic.
The largest part of this book (Chapters 2, 3 and 4) is dedicated to a thorough review of the dyslexia literature, in its cognitive, neural, genetic and educational/therapeutic aspects. The breadth of research covered is remarkable, and its treatment is accurate, if not perfectly well balanced. One may indeed regret that, for the sake of its argument, the book prefers to emphasize inconsistencies and disagreements, rather than providing a more constructive synthesis by focusing on the (admittedly scarce) converging lines of evidence and points of broad agreement.
