“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