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September 06, 2004

Dyslexia Across Culture

Dyslexia is a problem affecting different brain regions in different cultures.

Well, not quite. Chinese dyslexics have problems of their own.

The NSU article headlines with the culture thing, but the problem is actually one of phonetic scripts versus ideographic scripts. It takes a different skill set to learn Chinese or Japanese (the world's most god-awful written language bar none*) than it does English. The researchers know that, of course, which is why they compared Chinese with English.

*Any adult learners of the Japanese written language (Chinese too, probably) might be interested in this fellow's mnemonic approach. I can testify that it is quite useful.

Posted by Thrasymachus at 12:35 PM