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

for Chinese readers wishing to learn English

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know where to find a free Unicode font for simplified Chinese? I've got the PROnounce ad translated into simplified Chinese, but I want to do the same with the interface. Tcl/Tk can handle Unicode fonts just fine, but I can't find an unencumbered Chinese font?

Any pointers to free good-coverage Unicode font for Win32/WinCE?

-- js7a

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:established link

[Bastian]

Another thing that makes English difficult as a written language is that English has a very large number of vowel sounds, but all are represented by just five letters.

Mandatory joke...

[1001011010110101]

About the Dyslexic agnostic insomniac that stays up all night wondering is there's a dog.

Re:Mandatory joke...

[gbjbaanb]

or the dsylexic occultist who sold his soul to santa.

I guess he'll get his reward in the afterli.. well, boxing day at worst.

There's a fundamental difference

[Basje]

This is not too surprising, because of the different ways Chinese (and Japanese) and English (and all germanistic and romanistic languages) are read.

English is a synthetic language: you have to combine the characters to form the words and grasp concepts.

Chinese is an analytic language: you have to break apart the (combination of) characters to get the meaning to grasp concepts.

Both methods suit different people. People with a latent dyslexia, would not be showing signs of it when the form of reading they use suits their preferred way of thinking. Yet they would show dyslexia when they are already at a disadvantage. This, of course, works both ways.

Re:There's a fundamental difference

[jc42]

In a similar vein, I had a linguistics prof in college (a couple decades ago, so this isn't a new idea) who was involved in a study comparing the reading problems of children in the US and Israel. One of the points of interest was dyslexia.

Hebrew and English turn out to be rather different in this regard. The main differences are: Hebrew has no pairs of letters that are the same except for rotation or reflection, while English has a lot of them. Thus the b/d/p/q set shows a single form that occurs in four different orientations. Also, Hebrew has no upper/lower-case distinction, which is also a source of confusion in English. (It does have a print/script distinction, which presents the same sort of problem, to a lesser degree.)

OTOH, Hebrew has a number of letters that differ in only tiny details. Let's see if /. can handle Hebrew letters: //, . (Hmm ... That doesn't look too good when I hit Review. Oh, well. ;-) What would be a serif in English is a distinguishing part of some Hebrew letters.

Anyway, comparing reading problems in different writing systems is an old source of research funding. There's a fair amount of literature on the topic.

Re:There's a fundamental difference

[jc42]

Heh. I hope you get a few "funny" mods.

Of course, the same thing happens in print. Some fonts turn these sets of letters into glyphs that don't quite reflect or rotate into each other. But this doesn't help the 5-year-olds much, since it's really an example of another problem: the many different forms of the same letter in different fonts and scripts.

Another sort of problem that is nearly unique to our Roman alphabet: The pairs "cl" and "rn" can look like "d" and "m" in a lot of fonts and scripts. So "clear" can be nearly indistinguishable from "dear". I've seen cases where it was difficult to decide whether they meant "modern" or "modem". This is similar to the problems in Hebrew with the nearly-identical letters.

But if you want a really nightmarish writing system, take a look at Arabic. OTOH, it can be really pretty. ;-)

Re:usa usa usa

[jc42]

We might observe that most American-made dictionaries have long called themselves a "Dictionary of the American Language", not English.

Linguistically, of course, American is a dialect of English. But there is general recognition that "English" properly refers to the dialects spoken in England.

Then there are the Aussies who insist that they speak Strine, not English. ;-)

I'd imagine that the learning problems are similar in all three.

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.

Re:chinese friends say

[aminorex]

You haven't tried to discriminate between my zhao and wo. Spelling errors are entirely possible in Chinese. Each character is composed of a set of strokes, and the repetoire of strokes is fairly small. Substituting a hooked vertical for a straight vertical, or a narrow horizontal for a wide horizontal, will change the meaning and pronounciation of the character.

Re:usa usa usa

[jc42]

And what about ebonics?

Yup. The linguists usually call this BVE (Black Vernacular English), or sometimes BVA (Black Vernacular American) and classify it as one of the four main North-American dialects of English. It's interesting because it's primarily a social dialect rather than regional like the other three. Linguists also like it because of its radical differences from the other North-American dialects.

A big fuss has been made over this dialect, for social and political reasons. But linguists like to consider themselves scientists, so they mostly ignore such subjective (and sometimes moralistic and/or racist) attitudes. BVE under any name is linguistically significant and quite worthy of study.

Of course, linguists would say the same of Navajo, Chinook, Hawaiian, and Cajun French. Linguistic interest and political/social importance aren't particularly related.