Dyslexic in English but not in Chinese

bmsleight writes "Research published in Nature and other sources has found that there is no one cause for dyslexia; rather, the causes vary between languages. The finding explains why one can be dyslexic in one language but not another language. Wow, time for me to learn Chinese."

Comments

established link

[mcmonkey]

While this research does shed some more light onto the issue, language-specific issues wrt to dyslexia are well established. English is one of the hardest written language because of the number of sounds which are represented multiple ways (e.g. f, ph, gh) and the similarities in letters (e.g. p and q, b and d).

Wired ran a story last year on the Read Regular typeface which was designed to make each character more distinctive.

Re:This bothers me a little....

[jeif1k]

So why is it a brain anomaly if you or I have reading difficulties?

"Anomaly" doesn't mean "bad", it means "different from the normal or common". Einstein's brain was an anomaly, too.

It's not like natural selection has created a pool of "good reading brains".

No, but cultures have created writing systems that have worked "well enough" for most brains. Maybe they can be improved further and be made to work for more people; if you have any ideas, publish them.