Commonalities of Dyslexia in Mandarin and English Learners Camilo Castrillon

Commonalities of Dyslexia in Mandarin and English Learners

Camilo Castrillon

The reading deficits experienced by monolingual Mandarin and English speakers reveal a commonality in the presentation of dyslexia in different languages. Mandarin, a logographic system of writing (using single characters to express meaning and give context to pronunciation), provides a reader with a symbol that represents an idea and associates it with a phonemic character that gives a clue as to how to pronounce the word. Orthographic systems of writing like English provide a reader with certain combinations of single phonemes that combine to reveal a meaning to a word. This difference suggests that native Mandarin speakers more heavily use visual memorization of symbols at an early age in order to learn the language, whereas native English speakers more heavily rely on phonetic memorization of symbols in order to attach meaning (Caravolas, 2004). As one progresses in learning Mandarin or English, the learning process becomes more semantically focused, and the languages appear very similar in processing in the brain. The core manifestation of dyslexia in Mandarin lies in an individual's ability to productively process and use semantic information (the meaning of a symbol) to understand a new word. This deficit in ability to extract and express meaning of a written word appears to be experienced by both native Mandarin speakers and native English speakers with dyslexia, and is proof that similar processes and deficits are at work in dyslexia in both languages.