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.

Mandatory joke...

[1001011010110101]

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

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: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. ;-)