New Research Challenges Stereotype About Dyslexia

This article was co-authored by Hannah Jones (Ph.D. student, UCL Psychology and Language Sciences).

For many, reading is a pleasurable escape—a way to relax, learn, and explore new worlds. However, there is a common assumption that people with dyslexia do not enjoy reading. Our new study challenges this idea, offering fresh insights into how adults with dyslexia experience reading in real time.

Measuring Enjoyment Beyond Self-Report

Previous research has generally examined reading enjoyment using questionnaires or surveys. These methods ask people to reflect on their general attitudes toward reading.

Try it yourself! Rate how much you enjoy reading books, on a scale of 1-9. What number are you thinking of? And does your response reflect whether you plan to read a book today?

As you might imagine, these self-report scales may not accurately capture how people behave in from moment to moment. To get a clearer picture of people’s reading decisions, we took a different approach.

We asked adults with and without dyslexia to read short book extracts and rate their enjoyment as they read. After each passage, they had a choice: Wait a few seconds to continue reading or move on to a new text. This “willingness-to-wait” task allowed us to observe how enjoyment influenced motivation in real time rather than relying on self-report measures of reading.

Dyslexic Adults Enjoy Reading—But Are Less Likely to Persist

In line with previous lines, when we asked the general question about enjoying reading, adults with dyslexia reported lower reading enjoyment than neurotypical adults. Interestingly, when engaging with the text, we didn’t see this—adults with dyslexia reported similar levels of enjoyment. This contradicts the idea that people with dyslexia inherently dislike reading. However, a key difference emerged when we looked at what happened next.

Neurotypical readers who enjoyed a passage were more likely to wait and continue reading. In contrast, adults with dyslexia were less likely to wait, even when they found the text they had read enjoyable.

Further, among neurotypical readers, enjoying a passage was linked to better understanding of its content. Surprisingly, this boost in comprehension did not occur for adults with dyslexia. Even when they enjoyed what they read, they did not experience a boost in comprehension.

Why Doesn’t Enjoyment Translate into Engagement?

Why does reading enjoyment lead to persistence and comprehension for neurotypical readers but not for adults with dyslexia? The answer may lie in the additional effort required to read.

Reading is more cognitively demanding for individuals with dyslexia. Having to make that effort might reduce the pleasure they experience, preventing them from gaining the same benefits from enjoyable reading experiences.

Implications for Supporting Dyslexic Readers

These findings have important implications for how we approach reading interventions. Adults with dyslexia do not lack motivation or dislike reading. Rather, we observe that the effort required (e.g., to maintain attention or understand text) might diminish the perceived rewards from reading.

To make reading more engaging, we need to reduce these cognitive costs. This could include:

• Providing more choice in reading materials to ensure content matches personal interests If someone is interested in a particular topic, they will be more included to learn more or infer deeper.
• Experimenting with different formats, such as audiobooks or text-to-speech tools, to ease the cognitive load. This might reduce the effort of decoding.

Rethinking How We Support Reading Enjoyment

This study challenges the assumption that adults with dyslexia inherently dislike reading. In reality, they can find just as much enjoyment in books as anyone else—but for that enjoyment to lead to greater engagement and comprehension, we may need to rethink how reading is presented and supported.

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By creating reading environments that reduce effort while maintaining enjoyment, we can help adults with dyslexia stay motivated, build confidence, and get more from their reading experiences.