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in collaboration with
Gilles Leloup (Speech therapist, doctor in language sciences)
In an interview given to Le Parisien, the new Minister of Foreign Affairs Stéphane Séjourné, spoke of a diagnosis of severe dyslexia received during childhood and the difficulties that result from it in his role still today. Which obviously didn’t stop him from climbing the ladder.
Parents of dyslexic children can rest assured: you can be affected by a DYS disorder and aim for an important function. Proof of this is the appointment of Stéphane Séjourné to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, although he still has some after-effects of his dyslexia.
Writing and language disorders in a minister
The head of French diplomacy would thus still be accustomed to French mistakes and pronunciation errors, which delight Internet users who are easy to criticize. A fact that he explained in the pages of Parisian on January 20.
“At a very young age, I was diagnosed with a very strong dyslexia“, he reminds daily. A long period of work followed “rehabilitation” to get rid of his “oral defects”. Defects which, despite everything, can resurface in “moments of fatigue or stress”. Stéphane Séjourné assures us, however, that these defects have not “no involvement” on his work.
Surprising speech difficulties
Those who know a little about dyslexia are however surprised by the minister’s speech errors. According to the definition, a dyslexic person is “a person who will encounter a delay in the development of reading and writing processes in the course of their learning, but who has no comprehension or language problems.
Consulted by Doctissimo, Gilles Leloup, speech therapist and doctor in language sciences, explains the probable reason for this double difficulty:
There are three causes of dyslexia:
- A poorly stabilized phonology: the sounds of our language that we hear from birth (“p”, “b”, etc.) but which will be poorly differentiated and therefore poorly assimilated into a visual representation (the letter) by the ‘child ;
- A poor visual representation of the shape of letters which makes coding more complicated;
- A lack of link between the meaning and the symbolic representation of a letter, a word;
Three causes which will induce reading more slowly and less precisely than an unaffected person.
“But what we see in the minister are syntax problems. What we also know is that learning to read generally stabilizes the representation of words in people with oral language disorders. But if the minister had difficulty reading, it is more difficult to master his syntax since the stabilization through writing and reading could not be done correctly. This language disorder may be linked to his reading speed “.
Dyslexic people develop many other strengths
Can the learning delay of a dyslexic student negatively impact their future, as many parents fear? Gilles Loup evokes a strength rather than a handicap in the long term. “This will of course depend on socio-educational, economic and environmental factors. But adults with dyslexia can absolutely aspire to great careers. Although they generally keep a dysorthographyand a rather slow reading speed on novel-type media, they have perfect mastery of technical media, and studies show that dyslexic adults have acquired, due to their educational background, executive compensation skills superior to others.
In fact, dyslexic adults are often:
- More resistant to stress;
- More resistant to factors of cognitive exhaustion;
- More efficient in memorization.
Because they developed skills that became driving forces during their schooling.
“This allows them to have very good skills. The diagnosis of dyslexia is not a risk factor, but a protective factor” concludes our expert.