Chinese language and Dyslexia - Any input?

[ian]

Has anybody done any research on dyslexia and Chinese language? I would be interested in hearing about your studies if you have. I am a native English speaker who has studied Chinese at University - dyslexia caused me problems because my 'working memory' doesn't hold information very well and so the process of studying charactors was much more difficult than for a non-dyslexic.

[howtofindyou]

ian, i would like to help you in Dyslexia,to get over it,i am afraid you have to found a strong base on your chinese phonetics,get used to four tones in chinese characters you know,etc....

Please contact me in MSN or Skype

[dougm24]

Hey,

Before I did chinese I did a degree in psychology and I did a lot of reading about dyslexia and in particular with Chinese, but I'm afraid I've forgotten a lot of it. There's a much lower incidence of dyslexia in Chinese because it's not an alphabetic language, but I don't think anybody's ever studied how it would affect you in a second language.

Have you ever tried learning other languages and how do you find it? I would think it would be a steep learning curve at first to get used to pinyin but once you have a few characters under your belt, when you learn new ones you could peg their pronunciation together so it might get a lot easier.

If you want to read something about it, there was an article I read recently that was I think in New Scientist, if you go to their website you can probably find it. I would send it to you but gave it to a girl in my tutorial class a couple of weeks ago

Doug

[ian]

From what I've discovered about dyslexia, it seems that it is probably a fallacy that there is a lower incidence of dyslexia in China because they don't use an alphabetical based alphabet.

Until I was assessed as being dyslexic I also had misplaced notions of what dyslexia actually was - my spelling is not too bad, the problem is that the 'Working memory' as opposed to either 'short-term memory' or 'long-term memory' does not work as efficiently as it does in a non-dyslexic - effectively in the case of learning something such as Chinese or any other written language (written in my case, but perhaps not in other people's) it means that when I write a character 100 times on a sheet of paper I can then turn it over and as if by a miracle!! I do not remember how to write the chracter or even what it looks like!

From my experience over the last few years I have noticed that I actually seem to retain characters very well once they are in my brain, but the difficulties lie in getting them in there!!

[gato]

Do you think George W. Bush has dyslexia?

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_W._Bush

"Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many O-B-G-Y-Ns aren't able to practice their, their love with women all across this country"

Missouri, September 6, 2004

"There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, it's probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on…shame on you. It fool me. We can't get fooled again."[48] (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/08/1033538899806.html) Video: [49] (http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/bushvideos/v/bushfoolme.htm)

[gato]

This article below says that researchers found children who were dyslexic in Chinese had lower activity in their left middle frontal cortex, while western studies have found dyslexia is exhibited in lower activity in the left temporoparietal cortex. I don't know if that help.

http://www.xys.org/forum/db/8/79.html

阅读障碍症，中西各不同

由香港大学认知神经科学实验室Li Hai Tan 博士领导的课题组在上期自然报道：患阅读障碍症（Dyslexia）的中国儿童和患阅读障碍症的西方儿童大脑异常的区域不一样。

这项研究结果也表明纠正阅读障碍的方法可能因”文“而异。使用中文字符的儿童和使用拼音文字的儿童可能需要不同的治疗方法。

以前根据西方儿童所做的研究表明阅读障碍症的大脑异常部位是在左颞顶皮层（left temporoparietal cortex），但这是就母语是拼音文字的语言（如英语，俄语）而言。西方儿童的问题在于阅读时不能将字母转化成声音。中国儿童的阅读是以符号为基础，他们不必把字母转化成声音，而是需要记住每一个字符的形像和对应的发音和意义。

这项研究对阅读正常和有阅读障碍症的的中国儿童的大脑进行fMRI扫描。研究人员做了两个测验：在第一个测验里，他们拿出两个不同的中文字符，让儿童说它们是否发音一样。在第二个测验里研究人员列出一个正确的和一个错误的字符，让儿童说出它们的意思。

研究人员发现两组儿童在左颞顶皮层（left temporoparietal cortex）的活动并没有差别。差别在于有阅读障碍症的儿童大脑的左中前皮层（left middle frontal cortex）的活动性比正常儿童的要低，而这个部位是与视觉表述和记忆有关的区域.

这个发现表明用中文和用英语的人的大脑语言加工区域是不同的。它也解释了为什么有些人在用某种语言时有阅读障碍，但使用另一种语言时却没有问题。比如，一个用英日双语的用英语有阅读障碍，但用日语没有。

Slok W. T, Perfetti C. A., Jin Z. & Tan L. H. ２００４。Biological abnormality of impaired reading is constrained by culture。 Nature, 431. 71 - 76(2004).

[gato]

From the Dyslexia Assocation of Singapore. Maybe you can find these cited articles.

http://www.das.org.sg/news/differentorthographies.htm

SingapoLogographic Orthographies:

Although there are no graphemes and phonemes in a logographic script, there are also script-sound regularities known as orthography-phonology correspondence (OPC) rules (Ho & Bryant, 1997). These rules are part-to-whole in reading Chinese (Chen, 1993) because the pronunciation of a Chinese character can be derived from the phonetic value of just one orthographic component, i.e. the phonetic radical of the character.

The great number of visually distinct and complicated Chinese characters and the absence of GPC rules in Chinese often lead people to suggest that Chinese characters are learned as logograms (e.g. Baron & Strawson, 1976) and, as such, some researchers believe that visual skills rather than phonological skills are important in learning to read Chinese. For example, Huang and Hanley (1995) found that a combined visual score was a better predictor of Chinese word reading than a combined phonological score in Chinese third graders in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

However, contrary to the above findings, there is other evidence showing that visual discrimination skills and visual memory skills do not correlate significantly with Chinese reading performance in children, but phonological processing skills such as phonological awareness, phonological memory and phonological retrieval are important contributors to early reading success in Chinese (e.g. Ho & Bryant, 1997).

[beirne]

The topic came up again, this time in Cecil Adam's weekly Straight Dope column: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050408.html

[gato]

Hmm, maybe 'ian' is really Cecil Adams.

Note he just happens to ask his question the week before the Cecil Adams column. A coindidink?

[wushijiao]

Just a thought, but I would imagine that there are just as many dyslexics in China as there are in the US. Why? As far as I know, Chinese schools don't systematically test for dyslexia early on. I'd bet that with the highly text based testing system, many undiagnosed dyslexics are just seen as "dumb" and never test into college or the like.

I have only known one Chinese dyslexic. She was a girl that had a lot of troubles learning English, but when I asked her to read a passage of a Chinese newspaper, she read it slower than I would. I then asked if she was dyslexic. She was, and it seemed that in her case it was just as big of a problem in both languages.

[ChouDoufu]

I have a few foreign friends who are dyslexic, and they feel that dyslexia is poorly understood in China. One friend has tried talking to teachers about his problem only to get a response like, "so you're retarded?" In his experiences, some Chiense people do have dyslexia and exhibit difficulties learning that may or may not be different than westerners with dyslexia.