Dyslexia is Different in Chinese and in English speakers
The root of dyslexia is different in speakers of Chinese than it is in speakers of English, according to a new study in the April 7th Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dyslexia is a learning disability; children with dyslexia have trouble learning to read. Scientists at the University of Hong Kong have found that the cause of a child’s dyslexia depends on what language they are trying to learn. From Nature:
In 2004, Li Hai Tan at the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues examined patterns of activity in the brain as English and Chinese speakers — some dyslexic, some not — worked on various reading-related tests while inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. Results from this study suggest that the brain areas involved in dyslexia vary between languages2. In English, reading involves translating letters into sounds and putting them together. In Chinese, the key skill is memorizing a huge number of characters, each one mapping to a whole word. [my emphasis] So different brain areas are probably needed to accomplish the slightly different task of reading across the two languages.
But patterns of brain activity are a bit ambiguous as data. The researchers couldn’t be sure that what they were seeing — a less-than-lively left middle frontal gyrus in Chinese dyslexics, as compared with the temporo—parietal and occipito—temporal regions in their English-speaking counterparts — was the cause or the result of the disorder.
The new study used MRI plus a technique called voxel-based morphometry to measure the actual volume of the brain’s grey matter at the key sites. And sure enough, Chinese children with dyslexia had a significantly smaller left middle frontal gyrus than did Chinese children without the disorder, even though both groups had the same overall volume of grey matter.
John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, notes that the part of the brain involved in Chinese dyslexia is “associated with working memory — a higher stage of processing.” Another scientist, Elise Temple of Dartmouth, UK, suggests that the findings about dyslexia in speakers of different languages might have implications for treating dyslexic children:
If a child is likely to have severe dyslexia in English, maybe he or she could be taught to recognize whole words as units in the Chinese manner.
I’m ethnic Chinese on both sides; my 102 1/2 year old grandmother, Ngin Ngin, only speaks Cantonese (and she does not read or write). I actually don’t know Cantonese but learned Mandarin in college, and briefly tried to teach Charlie some Mandarin words—briefly as, for Charlie with his severe language disability, it’s more than enough to just work on speaking one language (American English, Jersey-style).
But knowing Chinese has helped me to better understand Charlie’s words and, even more, his non-verbal vocalizations (hums, singing, warblings). Chinese is a tonal language and there have been more than a few times when I’ve been able to figure out what Charlie is saying based on the melody, the high or low or rising or falling pitch of his voice (as when I realized that wowos was photos). Sometimes saying things to Charlie with a bit of a tune—as a musical phrase—has helped him remember them better.
Charlie has been taught some phonics and he (at long last) know the alphabet, but reading remains one of his chief challenges at school. He has seemed to do best with reading when a single word is presented on a card; I suspect that he memorizes the whole pattern of letters as a unit, somewhat as a reader of Chinese reads a character as a unit. His teacher has been focusing exclusively on nouns and first holding a flashcard of a word (”blanket,” “bike”) next to the actual thing, and then gradually removing the thing.
Maybe we’re finally getting on the right track to teach him reading.
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POSTED IN: China, Education, Neuroscience, Reading
17 opinions for Dyslexia is Different in Chinese and in English speakers
Melody
Apr 10, 2008 at 3:18 am
When I was in first grade, they tried to teach us phonics. I didn’t understand a bit of it. If that was the way I had had to learn to read, I wouldn’t have. Before I started school, I started learning smaller words and my own name by my dad writing it down for me and I studied the patterns. I learned words by their shapes, not by their sounds.
I started studying Japanese when I was about 12, and it is so much easier for me to learn than any other language I’ve tried. Especially in the characters that are used - it’s a lot easier than trying to remember all the letters in a new word in, say, French. Japanese comes to me a lot more naturally than any other language has (I’ve studied, to varying degrees, French, German, Russian, Korean, Ukrainian, Norwegian; most of these I’ve studied only peripherally, and Japanese is the only language besides English I’d have a hope of constructing a meaningful sentence in, though I’ve taken two years of French).
Ms. Clark
Apr 10, 2008 at 4:48 am
That’s interesting. I wonder if a Chinese dyslexic can get very far with pinyin? I don’t suppose it’s very easy to find literature in pinyin (Romanization of Chinese characters. I know Kristina knows what it is, but for the rest of you…) but it would give them a way to write notes anyway, and maybe to answer on tests, though it’s imperfect compared to being able to write in characters to be sure.
I’m not sure how many characters I can consistently read now… maybe it’s still around 150. If I stick with it for a week or so I can get it back up to around 200, but some of them are sort of only fragile in my memory. Remembering how to write them, that’s another thing. I can probably accurately write 80 or so from memory, though I haven’t tried to count them.
My handwriting is despicable in both English and Chinese. :-)
I had heard a long time ago that illiteracy was more common in China (and presumably Taiwan and anywhere else they use Chinese characters) because learning to read Chinese is just so hard. I never checked to see if that’s true. I wonder if there are any autistics who teach themselves to read characters at age 3 like with hyperlexia and English (and presumably other alphabetic languages)
One more thing… someone told me that Cantonese is the most difficult of all languages for non-natives to learn (comparing how hard it is for all other people to learn, not just for English speakers). I wouldn’t be surprised, Cantonese has some tricks about it that are not there in Mandarin even though they are SUPPOSED to be using the same characters.
laurentius-rex
Apr 10, 2008 at 5:07 am
In other words there are differrent forms of neurodiversity but the way they manifest and are labled is essentially a cultural phenomenon.
Just as I have said all along.
For the record the concept of Dyslexia is as argued over as the concept of Autism, however it has failed to grasp the public imagination in the same way.
You see Dyslexia as a lable only describes the construct of having difficulty with decoding words and language, it says nothing about the mechanism or mechanisms.
Incidentally whole word recognition happens in English too, however it is given short shrift by those who believe phonics is the answer to all the problems of teaching literacy therefore what we are seeing is the social and educational construction of a disability by the failure to recognise that individuals learn differently from each other.
As for me I have taught myself to distinguish different sorts of land rovers at a glance, when I was younger it was buses.
David N. Andrews M. Ed. (Distinction)
Apr 10, 2008 at 5:26 am
“Just as I have said all along.”
And me, too. We’re good, us! :)
Finnish-speaking dyslexics experience the phenomenon in a different way from English-speaking ones, too.
The joys of being an educational ethnopsychologist :D
Hsien Lei
Apr 10, 2008 at 8:17 am
Fascinating! I learned to read Chinese at a very young age, ~3 y.o. (according to my parents). I lived in Taiwan back then and learned to read first using the zhuyin phonetic system.I wonder how I would have fared had my first language been English!
M
Apr 10, 2008 at 10:06 am
“The joys of being an educational ethnopsychologist”
If someone were to educate people about the dangers of grain alcohol, would that make them an ethanolpsychologist?
Ack! Terrible word play! I lose points.
Ruth
Apr 10, 2008 at 10:25 am
Very interesting. We are working on ‘chuncking’-teaching my daughter to read whole sylabels, as opposed to phonics. How much of this involves being a visual learner? I know part of my daughter’s problem is processing the auditory signal and connecting that to the letters. When you play cards, do you look at the number 5 or the pattern of 5 hearts?
Eleanor
Apr 10, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I wonder if the same is true of hyperlexia? I recall an article from a year or so ago observing that brain scans comparing hyperlexics with dyslexics, and concluding that the underactive portions of a dyslexic’s brain corresponded with the overactive portions of a hyperlexic’s brain, and the underactive portions also mirrored each other.
Someone may have to track down some Chinese hyperlexics to study this!
laurentius-rex
Apr 10, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Depends what kind of scan you are talking about, FMRI or bog standard brain in drainpipe.
I am not sure whether I want to see the results of my scan cos I am sure I shall be seeing undeveloped gliomas and plaques all over the place. I don’t reckon you can get to the age of fifty without having multiple lesions all over your brain.
I do wonder whether it will settle the question of whether there are gross differences in my brain, or whether they are too damn microscopic to fathom.
I guess I am metalexic anyway, words are an end , and we are stuck with them to elicit and explain concepts and propositions that existed before codex and lex in a praeter verbal signiverse
Regan
Apr 10, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Eleanor does both phonics and sight-reading work–and seems to be about equal in both, although I have no doubt that with enough exposure to a word, phonically taught or not, it becomes automatically read as a sight word.
I’ve never thought about hyperlexia much–so this is a question–I never officially “learned” to read. My mom sat me on her lap and she read stories to me; no instruction, just holding the book and looking at the words. At about 4, I just started to read them, other things around the house and could read fast. No one taught me anything. In first grade I was put on stage as some kind of child prodigy to read a story from the 5th grade reader…but the thing was, I understood only a little of the story at the time. If someone had asked me anything detailed about the content, I would have been stumped and embarrassed. Later I learned the content of the vocabulary.
Is that hyperlexic behavior, or fairly typical?
Just asking because it makes teaching reading somewhat difficult for me–I have no perspective on the learning process involved. It just seemed to “come”.
laurentius-rex
Apr 10, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I was a stereotypical dyslexic myself struggling with letters and reading, it was my mum’s intervention that taught me to read not the schools method.
From what I read about hyperlexia, it is the ability to read but not necessarily understand.
Because reading is complex and involves a variety of neurological processes somewhat independant of each other, one can have paradoxical abilities.
Dyslexia is complex, I still have difficulty in reading word by word and line by line, but I seem to have a parallel ability, whether it is compensation or independant I do not know, but that is the ability to rapidly scan pages upon pages of text, not know what I am reading but to be able to be able to understand that at some indefinate time in the future even if I do not have immediate recall.
I sort of turn my comprehension off sometimes and simply put the pages in front of me. You might call it a kind of subliminal reading, it clearly does not depend upon the translation of symbol into phoneme, it would bypass that.
Regan
Apr 10, 2008 at 4:18 pm
laurentius-rex,
What you have described is very interesting.
I skim and scan more than see words and sentences. However, and I don’t know why, for about 3 months in college that ability turned off within the course of a day–poof–and all I could see was individual words and letters and it was completely incomprehensible; like having to read German. I could only read very slowly and painfully. It was like reading phonetically for an adult and there was no pleasure in the process. Literally the worst 3 months of my life. About the time when I was becoming very depressed about this–skimming and scanning turned back on. Don’t know why either of the above happened.
Lisa/Jedi
Apr 10, 2008 at 7:03 pm
I have noticed that when Brendan reads japanese (kana only, so far), he doesn’t sound out the words but looks at them for a bit & reads pretty much the whole sentence at once. I don’t ever recall him sounding out words in english either, for that matter. He went from non-reading (due to visual/perceptual differences) to reading (thanks to visual/perceptual therapy) within just a few months… I don’t remember what method of reading was taught at school, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t a system that used only phonics or anything else. He did most of his reading catch-up during the summer at home, so we used the “whichever books he’s interested in reading” method :)
From my own learning of japanese, I’m not surprised that reading kanji & kana engage different parts of the brain than romanji. One of the things I love about kanji is that it’s conceptual, & gives a lot of information in a small “package”.
Eleanor
Apr 11, 2008 at 4:07 pm
With hyperlexia, the key difference seems to be that there is a reversal in the sequence that the brain usually uses to map meaning. That is, it is “neurotypical” for a child to hear a sound, eventually attach a meaning to, learn to say it, then a few years later, figure out what the visual symbol is for it. With hyperlexics, the brain first maps the meaning to the visual symbol, then much later figures out what the associated sound is. (My layperson’s re-interpretation of how it was explained to me.)
Dyslexia, on the other hand, doesn’t involve the reversal of the usual learning order, just a problem in the visual-symbol mapping process.
Tatjana
Apr 11, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Dear Friends,
I am connected with an organisation called The Learning People, who have launched a UK petition on the Downing Street website to reclassify dyslexia as a thinking style rather than a disability.
You can access further information about the campaign, and sign up for newsletter updates, on our blogsite at http://www.dyslexia-gift.org.uk
If you are a UK resident or ex-pat British citizen, you can sign the petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk
Please help us publicise the campaign by telling everyone you know, and by passing the word around any other relevant networking groups you subscribe to.
Our sincerest thanks,
Tatjana Lavrova
Kristina Chew, PhD
Apr 11, 2008 at 11:16 pm
@Lisa/Jedi—what you write about lots of information in a small “package”—-makes me think about how one “reads”/”sees” a character differently than a word written using an alphabet.
@Tatjana, thank you for those links—
@Eleanor, dyslexia as a “problem in the visual-symbol mapping process”—that sounds more like Charlie’s difficulties with reading. He seems to just have to really concentrate to get his eyes to look at the letters and to think what they are, and how they are linked to sounds and meanings.
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