What is dysnumeria?
Dysnumeria is a learning disorder that causes a difficulty in reading or writing numbers. This disorder is separate from dyslexia (word reading disorder), dysgraphia (word writing disorder), and dyscalculia (an umbrella term for math-related disorders).
Dysnumeria results from a deficit in one or more of the mechanisms involved in number processing.
You can find information about the number-reading processes in this article. Generally, they include a visual analyzer, which parses the digit string; a core representation of the number’s syntactic structure; and a set of processes responsible for verbal production.
Number dictation involves several processes responsible for auditory-verbal input; the core number-syntax representation; and processes responsible for producing the digit string.
The MAYIM battery for assessment of dysnumeria
The MAYIM battery is a set of tests that can detect the existence of dysnumeria in a person and the specific dysnumeria subtype, i.e., the specific impaired process/es.
The battery includes several tests, e.g.:
- Reading aloud multi-digit numbers (with several variations of this task)
- Repeating multi-digit numbers
- Writing multi-digit numbers to dictation
- Copying numbers
- Same-different decision
- Consecutive digit sequence decision
- Number assembly (merge spoken digits into multi-digit numbers)
- Simple calculation
The MAYIM battery was developed in Hebrew, but can easily be adapted to other languages.
For now, detailed explanations of the battery exist only in Hebrew.