Is it possible to be dyslexic in Chinese? Surely someone with dyslexia wouldn’t be likely to misconstrue a word’s meaning if that word were represented as a distinctive symbol as in Chinese, right? I mean, if you were to show a dyslexic a picture of a house, that person would still easily recognize it, even though he might have trouble deciphering the written word. Or am I totally in the dark about dyslexia? –Rudy, Vallejo, California
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One thing at a time, bud. Your postscript refers to a bit of e-mail lore making the following contention: “Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.” This gave rise to a lively Internet debate, the upshot of which was that (a) the poeple at Cmabrigde had nveer haerd of tihs, and (b) the scrambling has to be done carefully if the text is to remain intelligible. (For one thing, you mix up key consonants at your peril.) To which I might add (c) none of this has jack to do with dyslexia–the fact that a normal reader can decode scrambled words tells you nothing about what a dyslexic would make of them. That said, (d) scrabmling ltteers wihle stlil pordcuing a radeable stneence is kidna fun.
For years the latter viewpoint had the upper hand. But last September a team of researchers led by Li Hai Tan published a paper in Nature saying: Not so fast. Tan and friends performed brain scans of Chinese readers, both normal and dyslexic, who were taking reading tests. They found that normal Chinese readers show increased activity in the brain’s left middle frontal gyrus, thought to specialize in remembering visual patterns (e.g., the thousands of Chinese characters), whereas Chinese dyslexics show less activity there. In contrast, readers of English show high activity in a different cranial district called the left temporoparietal regions, whereas English dyslexics show less.
