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and its relationship to dyslexia for us in the following way: “Procedural learning is learning how to do something, and learning it to the point where it’s automatic, so you know how to do it without having to think about it. This process of becoming automatic with complex rules and procedures is much more difficult if you’re dyslexic.”
    At least half the individuals with dyslexia have significant problems with procedural learning, and as a result they’ll be slower to master any rule-based, procedural, or rote skill that should become automatic through practice. Because most basic academic skills are heavily rule and procedure dependent, problems with procedural learning can cause a wide range of academic challenges, which are often especially intense in the early grades.
    For example, most language skills require the constant, rapid, and effortless application of rules and procedures, including differentiating one word sound from another; correctly articulating word sounds and correctly pronouncing words; breaking words down into component sounds; mastering the rules of phonics underlying reading (decoding) and spelling (encoding); recognizing rhymes; recognizing how changes in the forms of words can change word meanings and functions (morphology, e.g., run , ran , running , runner , runny , etc.); interpreting how differences in sentence organization and word order can affect sentence meaning (syntax); and recognizing language style and pragmatics (the language conventions that carry important social cues).
    Many other academic skills are also rule based, such as rote (or automatic) memory of things like math facts, dates, titles, terms, or place names; memorizing complicated procedures or rules for things like long division, carrying over, borrowing, or dealing with fractions in math; sequences, like the alphabet, days of the week, or months of the year; writing conventions like punctuation and capitalization; and motor rules for forming letters the same way every time, when writing by hand, and spacing evenly between words.
    Finally, individuals with procedural learning challenges also typically have difficulty learning simply by observing and imitating others as they perform the complete, complex skill—that is, by implicit learning . Instead, they learn better when rules and procedures are broken down into small, more easily mastered steps and demonstrated clearly—a process known as explicit learning . When you realize how important procedural learning is for most basic skills, you can see why procedural learning challenges have been thought capable of producing so many of the challenges associated with dyslexia.
    Because individuals who struggle with procedural learning have difficulty learning to perform rule-based skills automatically, they must instead perform these skills using conscious compensation , or the combination of focused attention and active working memory. The drawback to this kind of highly focused processing is that if too many parts of a complex task must be performed consciously (because the basic skills haven’t been mastered to the point where they’re fully automatic), then working memory resources are very likely to be overwhelmed. Since individuals with procedural memory problems must perform many tasks using conscious processing, they will often experience working memory overload, which makes them slower and more error-prone than others on routine tasks.
    Individuals with procedural learning challenges also tend to require many more repetitions than others to master complex skills. Dr. Fawcett explains: “You can teach a dyslexic child what the rules are, and she appears to grasp them, but then the rules slip away again. We actually came up with something we called the square root rule , which means that it takes the square root longer to learn something if you’re dyslexic than if you aren’t. In other words, if it took four hours to learn