dyslexia and learning Chinese

[li3wei1]

I'm doing some desk research on dyslexia and adult language students. If there are any dyslexics on this forum, I'd be interested in hearing from you about positive or negative experiences, resources, techniques, whatever, either by reply or PM.

One particular question: it appears that the 'transparency' of a language, i.e. the correspondence between orthography and phonetics (Spanish is very transparent, English extremely non-transparent), is important, so Spanish is easier for dyslexics to learn than English. Would that mean that bopomofo is easier than pinyin? Would the fact that it doesn't use the roman alphabet be another reason for it to be easier? How hard would it be for a dyslexic student in a simplified character/pinyin learning environment to access bopomofo for studying and typing?

Another question: I believe that one thing that gives dyslexic students trouble is lexical stress (which syllable of a word should be stressed), particularly when it changes the meaning of the word (insight vs. incite, forebear vs. forbear). Would this apply to tones as well?

Thanks!

[li3wei1]

I should add that names and contact information will be treated in confidence. What you tell me may be repeated, but anonymised.

Another interesting question. One researcher states, without much evidence, that "Semantic and phonological relations are more consistent with each other among complex characters than among those written in the simplified form" (Ju and Jackson, 1995, "Graphic and Phonological Processing in Chinese Character Identification"). This makes sense, in that with fewer strokes you can convey less information. What it means, though, is that in simplifying the language, they've made it harder, especially for dyslexics. As traditional characters are taught alongside bopomofo, it should be interesting to compare rates of dyslexia in Taiwan and the PRC, to see if the combined difference in transparency has any effect.

[陳德聰]

I just wrote a big long response and accidentally closed my browser before posting, so I am more than a little heart-broken right now... But I will now half-heartedly try to replicate the basic meaning without all the flowery language:

From what I've read, dyslexia is hard to define well. Different languages have different orthographic systems and thus potentially necessitate different processing abilities for readers. English is alphabetic, Chinese is logographic. It can then perhaps reasonably be assumed that the difficulty facing English dyslexics may not necessarily translate into the same difficulties when reading Chinese.

I read Understanding Chinese Dyslexia (Xiao & Cheung, 2010) for an overview of Chinese dyslexia. They suggest that phonological processing deficiency may not play as strong a role in Chinese dyslexia as in dyslexia associated with alphabetic languages. Also give a lot of information about different processing deficits that work together to create manifestations of Chinese dyslexia.

Cognitive Processing Skills and Developmental Dyslexia in Chinese (Wang, Georgiou, Das, & Li, 2011) mention "Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive (PASS) processing" and its apparent role in Chinese dyslexia in an attempt to get closer to what is really going on with dyslexics' brains.

Both show how issues in Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN), morphological processing, orthographical processing, etc. contribute to dyslexia, but that distribution of these deficiencies is varied.

I don't see the analogy between Spanish orthography being more transparent than English orthography and bopomofo vs. pinyin. Both systems employ an initial-final grouping (if I'm not mistaken?) for the same language, but I can see that you're talking about adult learners perhaps moving from an alphabetic system to bopomofo here? Not quite sure.

From what I read, I tried to come up with some reasonable hypotheses for your questions:

For a person who has trouble with alphabetic orthography, it may be possible that bopomofo is easier to retain, but it is likely that a person who has poor phonological processing will find it equally difficult to map sounds to bopomofo symbols and pinyin alike.

In Tonal Dyslexia in China (Luo & Weekes, 2004), they show that tone can actually be dissociated completely from the whole syllabic unit. The other two papers also cite problems with tone detection and awareness for Chinese dyslexia, so it would not be unreasonable to assume that lexical stress issues stemming from perhaps a memory or speech perception deficit would transfer over to a tone issues.

I was under the impression that any difference in reliability of the semantic and phonetic components between Simplified and Traditional was minimal, but I think that both sets of characters would pose the same level of difficulty for a person who has poor morphological processing or poor orthographic processing, since they have been shown to be less sensitive to statistical information embedded in written text.

I believe one of the two papers on cognitive processing mentioned that in Hong Kong (traditional characters?), dyslexia rates are comparable to those of English speaking countries, but that is just from my memory and my soul is too crushed to go back and check right now.

I get these papers through my uni database so if you can't get access to them just PM me.

[li3wei1]

Many thanks. I feel your pain at losing valuable work to cyber-limbo.

I should make it clear that my interest is not so much in Chinese dyslexics as it is in English dyslexics studying Chinese. Though obviously studies of Chinese dyslexia and reading development will be of some help.

I don't see the analogy between Spanish orthography being more transparent than English orthography and bopomofo vs. pinyin.

Spanish is regarded as 'transparent' because there's a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. This is also true of bopomofo, only instead of letters they use symbols. In pinyin, however, 'i' has several different sounds depending on what comes before it, so does 'uan', the 'y' in 'yi' is silent but pronounced in 'yan', etc. In other words, there are rules you have to learn in addition to the letter-sound correspondences, and they are different to the rules for European alphabetic languages.

While have hours of fun reading the papers, have my own university access, but thanks for the offer.

[skylee]

the 'y' in 'yi' is silent

Is this true? It seems that some people keep saying this but on the other hand it does not seem to be true. Is it possible that this is true for certain people or areas only?

[Lu]

I thought dyslectics had trouble distinguishing p/q, b/d etc? For that problem, Spanish would not be any easier than English or pinyin, but bopomofo might, although that has its own difficulties, like ㄜ/ㄛ. A dyslectic learning Chinese might want to skip phonetic writing altogether and just learn by sound (and later characters).

[li3wei1]

skylee: do you say 'ee' or 'yee'? When you say 一, does your mouth make one shape or two?

Lu: here, the British Dyslexia Association call Spanish the "best language for dyslexics to learn"

[skylee]

I say "yee". The pinyin of one of the characters in my name is "yi", so I doubt very much the "y" is silent.

[陳德聰]

Maybe discussion about pronouncing the 'y' in 'yi' is better for this thread, I have always been under the impression that there is something there.

I still am not really buying the analogy though, bopomofo encounters a similar problem with its glide + rime combos ㄩㄥ & ㄨㄥ doesn't it? I think Spanish is exponentially easier orthography to learn than English, but bopomofo doesn't seem to have that much gain on pinyin really.

[li3wei1]

Skylee, could it be the Cantonese influence? They definitely say 'yee' in HK.

In pinyin the w and y sounds are called half initials. When acting as initials they have their familiar sounds or are silent in the cases of wu and yi.

from http://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/learning-chinese/chinese-pinyin.htm

[skylee]

I think I have had enough humiliation for speaking Cantonese.

It might be worthwhile to listen to and compare the pronunciations of "yi" in official websites, such as those of the Taiwan Ministry of Education and the Hong Kong Government Education Bureau (links below). If there is a similar Mainland official website, please share. I have listened to words such as 伊/ 宜/ 已/ 億.

http://stroke-order....tw/character.do

http://www.edbchinese.hk/lexlist_en/

OP, sorry for hijacking the thread.

[Lu]

Lu: here, the British Dyslexia Association call Spanish the "best language for dyslexics to learn"

Out of four languages mentioned, without any information as to what they built their conclusion on. I don't begrudge anyone a comparatively easy time in their language-learning, but that table doesn't really say anything.

[li3wei1]

Skylee, I do not mean to humiliate anyone, certainly not for being able to speak a language. I am an American living among British folk, and am constantly reminded that there can be many ways of pronouncing things.

I listened to 伊 and 宜 on both the sites you provided, and I'm hearing 'ee'. I could be mistaken, but I seem to remember the Cantonese pronunciation of 二 sounding quite different, more like 'yee'. This involves two sounds, the first with the tongue tenser and a bit closer to the roof of the mouth, the second with the tongue more relaxed and 'flat'. But on the HK site, mandarin yi and canto ji sound the same (to me), so perhaps I'm wrong. I think we may be arguing over spelling, rather than pronunciation.

Lu: Yes, they only compare the four languages, and I'd love to see how they fit Chinese into the list. They base their conclusion partly on the "good sound-spelling relationship" (often referred to as 'transparency', see my first post).

[陳德聰]

I'm a lot more interested in this "silent y" thing after listening to a bunch of recordings on the HK site.

I recall my cousin from Taiwan once told me it really bothered her that people said 因 [jin] instead of [in], and I wrote it off because she often says a lot of things about language that come off as really snooty. My grandmother (Cantonese) pronounces 二 [ji], and when I speak Cantonese I do too, so I don't think you're wrong about Cantonese being more like "yee". But the interesting thing I found was that when I put in 而 in the HK one, then listened to 而已、轻而易举、显而易见、脱颖而出 it sounded like a more noticeable glide initial there. Discount the last one if you like, but I think I have definitely heard people saying that they don't think yin, ying should be read [jin], [jiŋ] too.

[skylee]

陳德聰[/color]']I recall my cousin from Taiwan once told me it really bothered her that people said 因 [jin] instead of [in],

Some people are bothered the other way around (but it seems many people don't understand his/her complaint) - 受不了把 一 [yi] 发音成英文 E 的人。