[Dyslexia-- a peculiar form of heterophoria?]

The authors discuss the problem of legasthenia--a particular impediment in the learning of fluent reading and orthographic writing. One connects it with a form of heterophoria in which the eyes--because of an inacurate and changeable function of binocular vision are unable to exert precise saccadic movements enabling a binocular or precisely unimacular reading. A childish art of following with the eyes from one detail to the other during the learning of reading must be transformed into minute fixation movements in conditions of a permanent excitation of convergence and accommodation to which the child is not accustomed. This leads sometimes to a false positioning of the eyes and in the consequence to a spatial disorganization in the succeeding set of letters. Therapeutical results show that as well legasthenia as its complications in the general behaviour of the child are receding together with the improvement of the sensorimotor functions of the eye.