Dyslexia as Phonological Ground State Inaccessibility: Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping Failure, Reading as Displaced Processing, and Structured Literacy as Return Path Engineering

We apply the Displacement Framework to dyslexia, formalizing it as inaccessibility of the reading ground state S°_read — the fluent state in which phonological decoding is automatic, requiring minimal working memory, such that text becomes transparent and attention flows to meaning. Dyslexia is a phonological deficit that prevents the typical construction of S°_read: phoneme awareness difficulties and phoneme-grapheme mapping failures elevate D(ξ_read) for every word, requiring effortful working memory that depletes with sustained reading.

Nine formal propositions are derived covering: S°_read as automatic phonological decoding transparency, phonological deficit as barrier to S°_read access, D(ξ_read) elevation per word as the defining displacement cost, school reading-medium environments as continuous Φ_read accumulation contexts (with Stanovich's Matthew effect formalized as Φ-compounding), shame and avoidance as secondary D(ξ) from primary accumulation, whole-word guessing as a wrong attractor that prevents phonological return path development, whole-language instruction without phonics as accidental wrong-attractor maintenance, Structured Literacy and Orton-Gillingham as evidence-based return path engineering, and neuroimaging evidence for return path traversal as right-to-left hemisphere processing shift with correct instruction (Shaywitz 2004).

The 'reading wars' debate is analyzed as a displacement-framework policy question: whole-language instruction inadvertently deepens the wrong attractor for phonologically vulnerable learners.