Dyslexia across Languages Zac Hillimire

Dyslexia across Languages

Zac Hillimire

Dyslexia, a learning disorder originating from the parietal and occipital lobes that causes difficulty and inability identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words, presents itself differently in different languages. Dyslexia has some key differences in the way it presents itself in English versus the way it presents itself in Mandarin; namely, in dyslexia’s point of origin and how it interferes with the language learning and word/character recognition process. These key differences presented themselves most notably when researchers looking at the brains of dyslexic Chinese children discovered that the disorder in that language often stems from two separate, independent problems: sound and visual perception. This is in contrast to how English speakers who have developmental dyslexia usually don't have trouble recognizing letters visually, but rather just have a hard time connecting them to their sounds. While there are certainly similarities and crossovers between the symptoms of dyslexia in Mandarin and dyslexia in English, the way dyslexia presents itself (and ultimately the way dyslexia is to be treated) is as different as the languages are to each other. With different alphabets and phonetic compositions, dyslexia will present differently.