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Education Science

Dyslexic in English but not in Chinese 69

Posted by michael from the brown-group dept.
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."
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Dyslexic in English but not in Chinese More

Dyslexic in English but not in Chinese

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  • for Chinese readers wishing to learn English (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 01, 2004 @03:03PM (#10407434)
    Does anyone know where to find a free Unicode font for simplified Chinese? I've got the PROnounce [readsay.com] ad translated into simplified Chinese [readsay.com], 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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by mcmonkey ( 96054 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @03:05PM (#10407455) Homepage
    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 [wired.com] ran a story last year on the Read Regular [readregular.com] typeface which was designed to make each character more distinctive.

    • Re:established link (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @03:31PM (#10407746)
      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.
      • English has a very large number of vowel sounds, but all are represented by just five letters.

        Not only that, but the usage of these letters is often inconsistent.

        Two examples: "oo" may sound like in cool, or in door or book, three different vowels. Or "ee" as in been or as in sheet.

        That's why many English speakers have terrible spelling. The English language could really use either a pronunciation or spelling reform. The former is practically infeasible, of course.
        • as would the latter, I think. At least, not without adding accents or more glyphs to the English alphabet.
          • Very difficult, and it has been already proposed a few times by important linguists, but is difficult to agree in these sort of reforms.

            If memory serves well, German has already had a 'recent' spelling reform. However, I guess it was never of the magnitude that needed for English.
    • "So far I have been able to manage replying and keeping up the work for making the typeface available, although I am not sure for how long this will be the case," she said.

      Maybe just putting it up for download on her website would ensure widest and easiest distribution of the font? Right now, the website seems oddly covered in trademark and patent notices.

  • chinese friends say (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In chinese, one symbol usually represents one word, so it would be hard to do any spelling mistake.

  • Mandatory joke... (Score:5, Funny)

    by 1001011010110101 ( 305349 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @03:27PM (#10407714)
    About the Dyslexic agnostic insomniac that stays up all night wondering is there's a dog.

  • The Reason (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One is a phonographic language and the other is ideographic. Not a big surprise. (Hint: 'Hukt on fonics' doesn't work for the Chinese.)
  • I haven't read TFA but funnily enough some really weird mistakes in language pop up in bi and trilingual people. I've got a few german friends who also know english and spanish and completely mispronounce sounds even after many years of living in spain. I know what I mentioned is not dyslexia but they also (to a lower extent) completely mix up words in their head, and this happens quite often.

  • This bothers me a little.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @03:40PM (#10407835)
    "So conclude researchers who have found that Chinese children with reading difficulties have different brain anomalies to their Western counterparts"

    So why is it a brain anomaly if you or I have reading difficulties? I mean, were we genetically disposed to read, or hunt and gather? I think it's a mistake to assume a "normal" brain reads well and an "abnormal" brain doesn't. It's not like natural selection has created a pool of "good reading brains".
    • I think it's a mistake to assume a "normal" brain reads well and an "abnormal" brain doesn't. It's not like natural selection has created a pool of "good reading brains".

      Hmmm... I'm not so sure you can still say that. Yes, wide spread literacy is only a recent phenomonon, but the environmental pressures on the human species to perform visual symbolic abstraction, which predates what we call "writing," has existed for at least 10,000 years, possibly as long as 250,000 years, if you count the very earliest

      • The connotation of "abnormal" equaling "deficient" is an unfortunate problem; its a big problem with USians in particular

        While I agree with everything you've said, I'd like to point out that it is also a particularly USian problem to assume that physical and genetic traits do not affect competency in certain tasks and jobs.

        No matter how hard I try, I will never be a basketball or baseball player. Somehow I deal with it.

        But for some reason everyone assumes that people with speech disorders make just as
      • USian isn't a word. The correct word is American.

        No definitions found for "usian", perhaps you mean:

        web1913: Asian
        wn: Sian Asian Hsian

    • Re:This bothers me a little.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by jeif1k ( 809151 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @04:35PM (#10408417)
      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.

  • There's a fundamental difference (Score:4, Informative)

    by Basje ( 26968 ) <bas@bloemsaat.org> on Friday October 01, 2004 @03:40PM (#10407839) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jc42 ( 318812 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @04:29PM (#10408345) Homepage Journal
      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.

      • Thus the b/d/p/q set shows a single form that occurs in four different orientations

        you obviously havn't seen my handwriting.

        • Re:There's a fundamental difference (Score:5, Interesting)

          by jc42 ( 318812 ) on Friday October 01, 2004 @07:17PM (#10409847) Homepage Journal
          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. ;-)

          • aw thanks. I hope you get some 'informative' mods.

            Yeah, I know what you mean - our choice of lettering can be quite poor, however, we've become quite good at recognising them though. Although 'modern' and 'modem' can be the same, we can still undrestnad what we tpye even if its gibbreish. I think that's really impressive, good job we also have context within a sentence to make sense of what we see. We don't really need to distinguish the letters if there's enough context.. err, and we've learned to read, o
    • I should note that Japanese also mixes Chinese-style ideograms with a phonetic alphabet - actually, two. One is called hiragana, and the other is katakana.

      Japanese phonetic writing in hiragana or katakana is *much* easier to read than Chinese, and easier than English as well. That's because it's a turely phonetic - one character makes one sound, and the pronounciation isn't changed by the surrounding characters, though there are special modifiers that can be attached to change a particular character's soun
  • If you wanna learn Chinese, you'll be just like Jin [anysonglyrics.com]!

    -bZj
  • The first step in dealing with dyslexia is admitting that you have it.

    Denial is not just a park in Alaska. [nps.gov]
  • It is a known fact (PDF) [www.hku.hk] that Chinese language processing uses different portions of the brain than English language processing. In addition, Mandarin Chinese requires one to interpret intonation [bbc.co.uk], thus using both temporal lobes instead of just the left one.

    So this finding is not necessarily a surprise, and it may not hold for languages that are similar to each other (such as English and Spanish).

  • Why do so many people focus on the language difference? Headline madness, maybe.

    One writing system goes through sounds, another one does not. What would the findings be if the group of chinese children would be from another area where they speak a completely different language but use the same chinese writing system?

    Sound related skills are necessary for one type of system (say sonogram), but not for the other (ideogram). The ideogram system may exclusively require other skills.
    Surely there are language-

  • Dyslexia in letters vs. numbers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by robson ( 60067 ) on Saturday October 02, 2004 @08:02PM (#10416714)
    I don't have any problems with written language, but written sequences of numerals are terribly problematic. The numbers (almost literally) jump around, switch places, and imposter for other numbers. This makes even simple math problems a nightmare. In high school, I got a solid D- in Algebra, followed by an A in Geometry the next year -- because geometry was all about proofs, shapes, and logic, without any of those messy numbers! :)
    • I'd be interested to know, do you get the same effects with numbers written out in word form?

      e.g. a telephone number of the form: five, five, five, one, two, three, four.

      I'm just wondering if it's something that is related to sequences generally -- regardless of how they are presented -- or whether there's something significant about the actual digit representations that makes them difficult for you to interpret reliably.
      • I'd be interested to know, do you get the same effects with numbers written out in word form?

        e.g. a telephone number of the form: five, five, five, one, two, three, four.

        I'm just wondering if it's something that is related to sequences generally -- regardless of how they are presented -- or whether there's something significant about the actual digit representations that makes them difficult for you to interpret reliably.

        Curious. It was easier for me to read and remember the sequence, though the blo
  • One of the issues in English, that is likely to get people, is that some words are not spelled as they are pronounced, or that the same spelling gives two pronounciations. Examples:

    Lead - to take the lead
    Lead - it is as heavy a lead

    Read - Read the book
    Read - I red the book
    Red - I chose the colour red
    Reed - The duck is amongst the reeds

    Put the former into a phrase: "I was lead to read the red book which was a heavy as lead, which was amongst the reeds" - I am sure you will
    • Put the former into a phrase: "I was lead to read the red book which was a heavy as lead, which was amongst the reeds" - I am sure you will have some people making mistakes here.

      You weren't "lead" to read, you were "led" to read ("led" is past tense of "lead"). So yes your point is proven, you will have some people making mistakes :)

  • that is time for you to learn Chisene ?

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