The difference is in the language -- not in the form of dyslexia. The brain function required to comprehend this:
is radically different from the function used in interpreting this:
Posted on 04/11/2008 2:06:32 AM PDT by neverdem
All dyslexics are not alike. According to new research, Chinese- and English-speaking people with the disorder have impairments in different regions of their brains. The findings shed light on the neurological basis of dyslexia and reveal fundamental differences in how brains process the two languages.
Dyslexics, about 5% to 10% of the population in both the United States and China, have trouble making the connection between the sight and sound of a word. In English, this results in word distortions or transpositions of letters. "Dyslexia," for example, might be read as "Lysdexia." In Chinese, the problem can affect how a person converts a symbol into both sound and meaning. Brain imaging with reading-impaired Chinese children has shown that these functions are mediated by a different part of the brain than is reading and writing in English (ScienceNOW, 1 September 2004).
Now a group headed by Li-Hai Tan at the University of Hong Kong has shown that these functional differences between Chinese and English speakers are rooted in the actual anatomy of the brain. The team did an analysis, called voxel-based morphometry, to get precise three-dimensional brain measurements from 16 dyslexic Beijing schoolchildren and compared them with those from 16 “normal” Chinese readers. The data showed that although total volume of gray matter--the part of the brain devoted to higher cognitive functions--did not differ between the two groups, the dyslexics had significantly less gray matter in the left middle frontal gyrus, an area important for identifying images and shapes, as well as recalling memory. The brains of English-speaking dyslexics, in contrast, have less gray matter in the left parietal region, according to a study reported by a different group last year. This region is more involved in converting letters to sounds than in the interpretation of shapes. "The finding is very surprising," says Tan, whose team's work appears online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We had not ever thought that brains are structurally different for dyslexic children in two cultures."
The findings make sense based on the vastly different nature of the Chinese and English written languages, says neuropsychologist Robert Desimone of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Whereas Chinese relies on complex images to represent entire words, English is an alphabetic language that relies more on rules and less on pattern recognition and memory. Now that differences in actual brain anatomy have been revealed, scientists are "a step closer to the underlying problem" of dyslexia, adds MIT cognitive psychologist John Gabrieli, who was involved in the English dyslexia study.
So if you are dyslexic in one language, would you be dyslexic in the other? That's "a totally fascinating question," says Gabrieli. But Han doubts it, because he says that his group thinks "different genes may be involved in Chinese and English dyslexic readers."
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Oh sure ... now I oversit.
Is an interesting read, but why didn’t they test people who were Dyslexic in Chinese who now also spoke English, and English-speaking dyslexics who now speak Chinese? Is it not possible that a dyslexic might not be dyslexic in the other language?
“So if you are dyslexic in one language, would you be dyslexic in the other?”
What an exchange program THAT would be...
Seriously now, don’t they know? Couldn’t they find anyone bilingual in Chinese and English, and dyslexic?
It's possible that no such person exists on earth - it might be the case that if you are bilingual in Chinese and English your parietal disposition is such that you can't be dyslexic
The shrewd will now think: Jeez, sounds like you could be dyslexic in one language but not the other. Exactly. Commenting on Li’s work in the Guardian, British neuroscientists Brian Butterworth and Joey Tang point to the case of Alan, who has English parents but was raised in Japan. Alan is severely dyslexic in English but has no problems reading Japanese. Naturally, say Butterworth and Tang. They think dyslexia is the same for everyone, and affects “phonemic analysis”—the ability to convert letters into sounds, which the reader then assembles into syllables, words, sentences, etc. Alan’s problem presumably is that he’s lousy at phonemic analysis but OK at the skills needed to decode Japanese. (Japanese, so we’re clear, uses various scripts in addition to Chinese pictograms but still basically matches one symbol to one syllable.) Butterworth and Tang suggest that the dyslexia = sucks-at-phonemic-analysis theory also explains why there are fewer Chinese dyslexics: phonemic analysis is an extra step for which Chinese readers have less need.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050408.html
What have you been doing with your tisrevo since you won it?
anti-thesizing.
The difference is in the language -- not in the form of dyslexia. The brain function required to comprehend this:
is radically different from the function used in interpreting this:
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Thanks neverdem.A dyslexic man walked into a bra.I wonder if they'e made a study on Chinese vs other kinds of stutterers? |
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I think the secret to this interesting difference will be found buried somewhere in the DNA.
What does DNA stand for?
National Dyslexic Association!
Didja hear about the dyslexic with Tourette’s syndrome?
He went around yelling “This! This! This!”
Q: Why was the dyslexic thrown out of the piano bar?
A: He kept hacking loogies in the jar marked “tips”.
That was brought up as a possibility a the end of the article. I am sure that will be these folks’ next study.
Frankly, I'd think that "dyslexic" would have no counterpart in Chinese because it would require misplacement of complex symbols/images rather than individual letters/sounds.
The idea of reading Chinese characters backwards or out of sequence fairly moggles the bind.
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