dyslexia in different languages

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Here's a link to an article, which is also copied and pasted in below,

about

dyslexia and other languages. Another reason Chinese may have a lower

incidence is because it is a " singing " language, dependent on tone for

meaning. People who lose speech after strokes can often sing words

when they can't talk. You use different parts of the brain. But this is

science, not EM. I'll bet you'd use different ways of approacing the

energy interventions based on this, though. Sue

 

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050408.html

 

 

 

Is it possible to be dyslexic in Chinese?

 

08-Apr-2005

 

 

Dear Cecil:

Is it possible to be dyslexic in Chinese? Surely someone with dyslexia

wouldn't be likely to misconstrue a word's meaning if that word were

represented as a distinctive symbol as in Chinese, right? I mean, if

you were to show a dyslexic a picture of a house, that person would

still easily recognize it, even though he might have trouble

deciphering the written word. Or am I totally in the dark about

dyslexia? --Rudy, Vallejo, California

PS: Is it true that the order of letters in a word is unimportant in

reading, aside from the placement of the first and last letter? I have

tried this and it seems pretty plausible.

Cecil replies:

One thing at a time, bud. Your postscript refers to a bit of e-mail

lore making the following contention: " Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at

Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a

wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer

be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll

raed it wouthit porbelm. " This gave rise to a lively Internet debate,

the upshot of which was that (a) the poeple at Cmabrigde had nveer

haerd of tihs, and (b) the scrambling has to be done carefully if the

text is to remain intelligible. (For one thing, you mix up key

consonants at your peril.) To which I might add © none of this has

jack to do with dyslexia--the fact that a normal reader can decode

scrambled words tells you nothing about what a dyslexic would make of

them. That said, (d) scrabmling ltteers wihle stlil pordcuing a

radeable stneence is kidna fun.

OK, back to business. Your letter betrays a common misconception about

dyslexia, namely that it boils down to scrambling letters. This leads

some to reason: Chinese has no letters (one ideogram = one syllable =

one concept); therefore, you can't be dyslexic in Chinese, right? No

such luck. While it's true that letter reversal is common in

English-speaking dyslexics, the term refers to any reading disability,

and the Chinese have their share of folks who struggle to make sense

of the written word. However, they seem to have fewer of them than we

Anglophones. Some say 15 percent of English speakers are dyslexic,

whereas only 7 percent of Chinese speakers are. (Others peg it at 5 to

6 percent English versus 1.5 percent Chinese, but same idea.) Why the

difference? Not clear, but there are two schools of thought. School

#1: It's because English dyslexia is totally different from Chinese

dyslexia. School #2: It's because the two are the same.

For years the latter viewpoint had the upper hand. But last September

a team of researchers led by Li Hai Tan published a paper in Nature

saying: Not so fast. Tan and friends performed brain scans of Chinese

readers, both normal and dyslexic, who were taking reading tests. They

found that normal Chinese readers show increased activity in the

brain's left middle frontal gyrus, thought to specialize in

remembering visual patterns (e.g. the thousands of Chinese

characters), whereas Chinese dyslexics show less activity there. In

contrast, readers of English show high activity in a different cranial

district called the left temporoparietal regions, whereas English

dyslexics show less.

The shrewd will now think: Jeez, sounds like you could be dyslexic in

one language but not the other. Exactly. Commenting on Tan's work in

the Guardian, British neuroscientists Brian Butterworth and Joey Tang

point to the case of Alan, who has English parents but was raised in

Japan. Alan is severely dyslexic in English but has no problems

reading Japanese. Naturally, say Butterworth and Tang. They think

dyslexia is the same for everyone, and affects " phonemic

analysis " --the ability to convert letters into sounds, which the

reader then assembles into syllables, words, sentences, etc. Alan's

problem presumably is that he's lousy at phonemic analysis but OK at

the skills needed to decode Japanese. (Japanese, so we're clear, uses

various scripts in addition to Chinese pictograms but still basically

matches one symbol to one syllable.) Butterworth and Tang suggest that

the dyslexia = sucks-at-phonemic-analysis theory also explains why

there are fewer Chinese dyslexics: phonemic analysis is an extra step

for which Chinese readers have less need.

Tan's finding undercuts that idea, Butterworth and Tang

concede--Chinese dyslexics seem to have a problem in an entirely

different part of the brain from English dyslexics. You may say: So

what? Here's so what. Given what we know about the brain (not much),

anything that helps us get a handle on its inner workings has gttoa hlep.

--CECIL ADAMS

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