They placed her in an intensive educational intervention program with Lindamood-Bell for a few weeks, which developed her phonemic awareness and she gained years in reading skills. She is now earning A's and B's in her fifth grade class. Many children and adults suffer deficits in two primary sensory-cognitive functions which interfere with their ability to process language. One is phonemic awareness weakness, such as Olivia Muskie had. The second problem is concept imagery weakness, and though more serious, it is often more difficult to diagnose.
Imagery is the sensory system's way of connecting to language.
The brain sees the language it reads or hears. But, for some individuals, the brain doesn't image the whole or concepts of the language. This weakness puts individuals in the often tragic situation of grasping parts of what they hear, or parts of what they read. They have trouble following conversation and getting the main idea, or making an inference, or drawing a conclusion. However, they often can read words well, and do not have trouble with phonemic awareness.