As a result, dyslexics make lots of mistakes when mentally converting sounds to letters and letters to sounds.

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The check is aimed at measuring whether pupils have a good understanding of phonics - the sounds of letters and groups of letters - which the government says is the key to helping children to read.

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Students spend a year building fundamentals like identifying upper- and lowercase letters and their sounds, recognizing numbers from 0 to 20, and learning physical education, music and art.

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Dyslexia was long thought to be a vision-related problem, but there's a growing consensus that dyslexics instead have difficulty associating letters with spoken sounds and blending them together fluidly to make words.

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"The technology would allow me to create letters that could talk and say the sounds they make, " says Wood.

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