The Relationship Between Creative Thinking and Developmental Dyslexia
Alice Disarò
Since the latter twenty years of the last century, various scholars have discovered that many illustrious personalities present marked creative thinking and, at the same time, characteristics attributable to a learning disability. There has been speculation that there may be a link between learning difficulty and the increased creativity observed. This has aroused great curiosity in researchers to the point of giving birth to the idea that, beyond the specific deficit in reading, there may be strengths in people with developmental dyslexia. The objective of this article was to delve into the scientific literature in order to investigate the relationship between developmental dyslexia and creativity. The discovery of the existence of greater creativity in people with developmental dyslexia could have positive repercussions on scholastic, social and personal contexts. However, the results of the studies considered for this article appear to be conflicting: some authors consider people with developmental dyslexia to be more creative, others conclude that the level of creativity is not different. Several factors that could affect the results obtained are considered, such as intelligence, gender or age of the participants. The only relevant factor seems to be age: several studies report marked creative thinking in adults with dyslexia. Most of the articles examined state that the plurality of results obtained mainly depends on the different sampling methods or on the type of task used to measure creativity.
Keywords
Developmental dyslexia, Creativity, Creative thinking, Learning disabilities, Learning.