LEXICON - dyslexia: sight, sound and sense

Description of impact

LEXICON is an audiovisual composition exploring the experience of dyslexia from a child's point of view. The work is a collaboration with dyslexia researchers, and presents a poetic and metaphorical interpretation of current thinking in dyslexia research.

Impact Summary for the General Public

Lexicon is based on a poem written by a 12-year old boy, Tom, in which he tries to articulate his personal experience of dyslexia. By presenting an imaginary sonic and visual journey through the text of the poem, Lexicon explores not only the challenges, but also the life-affirming creative potential that dyslexia, and a fuller understanding of it, can bring.

Description of the underpinning research

As part of the creative process the composer has worked with a team of dyslexia experts from the Miles Dyslexia Centre at Bangor University, which has enabled the composition of the piece to draw inspiration from recent research in the field. In particular it makes use of growing body of evidence that suggests that, for many people with dyslexia, a deficit in phonological processing (accessing and analysing speech sounds, and also linking them to letters) is more significant than that in visual or attentional processing on their own. This contradicts the popular but less well supported notion that dyslexia is primarily about difficulties in seeing letters and words on the page. Accordingly, Lexicon is a work conceived primarily with sound as its raw material, with the visual aspect conveying a metaphorical rather than scientific view of the experience of dyslexia.

Beneficiaries and reach of impact

Educationalists, people with dyslexia, those working with people with dyslexia, the general public. LEXICON has been been seen live by more than 1700 people in 18 venues across the UK, as well as in performances abroad. It has been viewed more than 2000 times on YouTube and Vimeo, by people from more 76 countries.

Impact status	Closed
Impact date	28 Oct 2012 → 30 Apr 2013
Category of impact	Cultural, Societal, Health/Quality of life
Impact level	Engagement