Content area
Full Text
Presented to
Margaret J. Snowling, Ph.D., Dip. Clin. Psych. Personal Chair, Department of Psychology, University of York, United Kingdom
In recognition of your pioneering and influential work on the cognitive aspects of developmental dyslexia, advancing our understanding of the relationship between oral language, development and dyslexia, and the nature of reading disabilities internationally.
56th Annual Conferecne of The International Dyslexia Association Denver, Colorado, November 11, 2005
I am extremely honored to receive the Samuel Torrey Orton award, and am all too aware that not only is this a most prestigious award but also that it is unusual for it to go to a non-American. In this regard, it seems that I am the first British nominee since MacDonald Critchley who, as many of you know, was a neurologist at the National Hospital Queen Square in London. It was at the same hospital that I did some of my clinical training in neuropsychology and where I taught for the first 13 years of my career. I feel that in receiving this award, I am doing so on behalf of a group of researchers who together have put Britain back into the frame of dyslexia research.
In considering what I should say in receiving this award, I have sought the advice of a number of esteemed colleagues. The advice I have received is very varied, so I am going to take the advice of my good friend Malt Joshi and tell you a little about how I got interested in dyslexia and how my research and thinking has developed since the early days of my career.
I first began research on dyslexia some 30 years ago, but my interest in the topic goes back much farther than this. Like many in the field, it was experiences in my family of origin that fueled an interest in trying to discover the causes and treatments for dyslexia. Our family was what Samuel Orton would have regarded as typical of those with what he called "strephosymbolia." My father was, by his own admission, "not a great reader." He had marked word finding difficulties and, much to our amusement, his speech was replete with malapropisms. I was the statutory left hander but sickeningly, a child who took to reading like a...