Study: Dyslexia Differs by Language
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Dyslexia affects different parts of children’s brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. That finding, reported in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, means that therapists may need to seek different methods of assisting dyslexic children from different cultures.
“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.”
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Reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese, which relies less on sound representation, instead using symbols to represent words.
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Tan’s research group studied the brains of students raised reading Chinese, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. They then compared those findings with similar studies of the brains of students raised reading English.
Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University in Washington, said the process of becoming a skilled reader changes the brain.
“Becoming a reader is a fairly dramatic process for the brain,” explained Eden, who was not part of Tan’s research team on this paper.
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.
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That means, “we cannot just assume that any dyslexic child is going to be helped by the same kind of intervention,” she said in a telephone interview.
Tan said the new findings suggest that treating Chinese speakers with dyslexia may use working memory tasks and tests relating to sensor-motor skills, while current treatments of English dyslexia focus on letter-sound conversions and sound awareness.
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“Previous genetic studies suggest that malformations of brain development are associated with mutations of several genes and that developmental dyslexia has a genetic basis,” he said in an interview via e-mail.
“We speculate that different genes may be involved in dyslexia in Chinese and English readers. In this respect, our brain-mapping findings can assist in the search for candidate genes that cause dyslexia,” Tan said.
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The study was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the University of Hong Kong.
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[Editor’s Note: “Functional and Morphometric Brain Dissociation Between Dyslexia and Reading Ability,” by Fumiko Hoeft et al. can be read on-line here. It can be downloaded as a PDF document here.
(Posted on April 9, 2008)
Comments
Chinese speakers with dyslexia may use working memory tasks and tests relating to sensor-motor skills Chinese is more an art-form then. Its like painting, but it must be precise.
Posted by at 7:36 PM on April 9
As a specialist in this field I claim that this and others cooked to order ‘researches’ are rubbish. Chinese requires even MORE skill of sound representation. Say, a word close to ‘ma’ in English transcription has four meanings depending on pronunciation.
Dyslexia was invented in the USA and dwells only in the USA. It is a nice screen to cover a teacher’s ignorance.
I usually remark, “Chinese somewhat not easy language, correct? Yet there’s has been no one dyslexic in the entire history.” And it’s a catch. Why?
They usually respond, “You see it is a different language.” “Wonderful say I, “How come there’s NO ONE dyslexic in England?! then in Russia, in Spain, even in Africa and Mexico.”
Educate American teacher before letting them in a classroom.
Posted by alex at 8:39 PM on April 9
One of the many cases where scientists are foolish in the extreme. All they had to do was ask some bilingual people (only about a bazillion of us around, lol). They will be happy to tell you that speaking in the separate languages has a “compartmentalized” quality to it. Even to the point where there are personality differences when you think and talk in the other language. A bilingual dyslexic would happily tell them the disease is different or even absent in the other language.
No need for expensive PET scans etc. Just ask.
Posted by at 9:19 PM on April 9
This study, though not intended for such, has made a case for teaching western children an East Asian language, as a second language, in elementary school. Think of it as a kind of calisthenics for the developing brains of children.
Posted by PBL at 10:51 PM on April 9
As someone who is English and Dyslexic and an infrequent poster to this site all I can say is Alex you could not be more wrong if you possibly tried.
Posted by John, Somewhere in Staffordshire at 5:30 PM on April 10
As a specialist ….. no dyslexia in England etc.
Sorry Alex there are quite a few dyslexics in England and also in France. English and French both create many more phonemes than say Italian or Spanish, 1200 phonemes are made from the 26 letters while Italians and Spanish make only 130 phonemes using the same 26 letters in the Roman script, which makes both of them very hard to learn creating more dyslexics. Lack of phonics in teaching may be a factor also.
Posted by The Guru at 5:33 PM on April 10
I always thought that this would be rather obvious, considering the huge differences in how English and Chinese are structure.
Posted by at 6:02 PM on April 10
Alex, you are plain wrong - I am English and Dyslexic.
Posted by John, Somewhere in Staffordshire at 11:37 AM on April 11