io9
People suffering from dyslexia may find that their problems evaporate when they learn a new language, especially one that works with symbols very different from their native one. A study released yesterday reveals that brain abnormalities in English-speakers with dyslexia are quite different from those in people who speak Chinese. So it's very possible that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese wouldn't be in English, and vice versa. This also helps explain why so many dyslexics are able to excel at computer programming, which requires them to write very precisely in a computer language.
According to Discovery News:
Dyslexia affects different parts of children's brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. . . "This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics' brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese," said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. "Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia."Why would English and Chinese dyslexia be different? Continues the article:
Reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese, which relies less on sound representation, instead using symbols to represent words . . . For children, learning to read is culturally important but is not really natural, Eden said, so when the brain orients toward a different writing system it copes with it differently. For example, English-speaking children learn the sounds of letters and how to combine them into words, while Chinese youngsters memorize hundreds of symbols which represent words.The researchers suggest language-specific therapies for dyslexia which account for these differences: English-speaking dyslexics would learn to read by focusing on sounds. Chinese-speakers would focus more on memory cues.
However, another possibility is that English-speakers with dyslexia might be better-suited to read and write in Chinese. And vice-versa. Teaching children both languages could be another way to foster writing ability and reading comprehension. Image via Discovery.
Dyslexia Differs by Language [Discovery News]
Comments
Having a teenage son with severe dyslexia ( he is an A grade student in all his subjects - he's a persistent , hard worker ( certaily didn't get that from me ) ) - I can confirm the article's premise, as he does not have any problems in his Japanese classes whereas even with spell checker on the word processor he struggles with English.
A great deal of my friends, who are dyslexic, excel particularly at computer languages. It's quite remarkable.
Maybe dyslexia is latent until the language learning process, and when a language is learned later in life it is not affected.
Can I sound like more of a pretentious cockhead than I usually do for a second here? If everyone would actually read Marshall McLuhan instead of just name-checking him, there's all sorts of stuff (like this!) that we could have put to rest a long time ago. Forty-five years ago, he was suggesting exactly this kind of thing about dyslexia.
I tend to transpose letters, numbers and words a lot... I doubt another language could help that.
@BlindKarma: Well you won't know until you try, so TRY IT!!!
No wonder I sucked at programming!
I'm pretty sure you're jumping to conclusions here. We don't know if the differences between Chinese-reading and English-reading dyslexics is in which variant of dyslexia they have or how dyslexia affects brains under various language conditions.
@BlindKarma: Me too. It has always been a pain in the ass to have this condition. It only happens with my own writing, though. I can almost always spot mistakes in something that I'm reading, which has been written by someone else. And coding was never any easier for me.
If so, does it bring up the possibility that some cultural tendencies may, perhaps, be based on different parts of people's brains being used more or less regularly due to the written language they use?
Start a discussion:
Login with your username and password below. Or comment on this post via email.
Forgot your username or password? New User?