Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities, but is also severely underdiagnosed. Early intervention is demonstrated to produce a better prognosis, but lack of awareness can impede pursuing and accessing treatment. Dyslexia Awareness Month has been implemented in both Canada and the United States during the month of October as a way of increasing the public’s knowledge of this learning disability. The objective of this study was to ascertain the effectiveness of these campaigns between the years of 2016 – 2019 in both countries. We employed ‘Google Trends’, which is a statistical tool that can be used to compare volumes of specific Google searches, to evaluate the relative number of searches for the term ‘dyslexia’ before, during, and after the awareness month campaigns each year. Our results show a significant increase in dyslexia-related search inquiries during October in both countries, but the timeline of these differences varies.