Dyslexia in chinese readers

Dyslexia is a learning disability that mostly affects our ability to read fluently and spell words correctly, among other difficulties. This does not affect the persons overall intelligence, actually, those with dyslexia tend to have strong reasoning abilities and are fast and creative thinkers. It’s a quite common disability, as it represents up to 90% of those with learning disabilities.

The english writing system, based on latin characters, has a complicated phonological system. The process in our brain when reading is something like this; Recognize the character, spell the possible sound for all characters in the word, and then recognize the word from all the words you know. Here, someone who has issues converting letters into sounds will struggle. The ability to speak or understand is not impacted, but they are unable to associate a letter with the sound.

However, the Chinese written language is based on logograms and ideograms, which means a character can represent a word or an idea that is associated with the sound. This makes the reading process a bit different. Instead of the process explained above it will be something like this; Recognize the character, remember the phonetic sound for this character, and finally you recognize the word associated with this character and this sound. There are about 50 thousand Chinese characters, to read a newspaper you will need to know 3 thousand. It is estimated that a well-educated adult knows around 8 thousand characters.

To read a Chinese language, you need to connect this logogram with the sound, and memorize the pronunciation of all characters as opposed to learning the sound of individual letters as you would in english. How does dyslexia then affect Chinese speakers?

Katherine Harmon writes in Scientific American that a study has revealed differences between how dyslexia impacts English and Chinese-language readers. Researchers have discovered that the disorder usually stems from separate and independent problems regarding sound and visual perception. The difference in the reading process has led researchers to believe disabilities within the visual realm may play a part in dyslexia for Chinese readers.

The lead author of University of Hong Kong, Wai Ting Siok said, “A fine-grained visuospatial analysis must be preformed by the visual system in order to activate the characters’ phonological and semantic information”. Wai Ting Siok has discovered that dyslexia in Chinese is not the same as dyslexia in english. Her teams MRI studies revealed that dyslexia in alphabetic writing systems and logographic writing systems is associated with different parts of the brain. The reason is the difference in how the languages are processed as has been detailed earlier in this text. This could possibly mean that a dyslexic English reader may not be dyslexic when reading Chinese, and vice versa. However, Dr. Becky Chen-Bumgardner has found that 30% of dyslexic children in English will also be dyslexic in Chinese.

According to Tan Lihai, director of Shenzhen Institute of Neuroscience, dyslexia may be more difficult for those who learn to read and write in Chinese, as the language has thousand of characters. Alphabetic languages have a standard set of letters used to spell out words, but a Chinese characters has close to no information about the sound it makes. For example, 土 (tǔ) means dirt or soil, but 士 (shì) means scholar. A dyslexic person may write one character as two, add a stroke or mix up parts of it or skip words completely when reading.

It used to be believed among experts that dyslexia did not affect Chinese speakers, and this field was very small in mainland China until the 1990s. Still, there is not much research and not enough support in Chinese schools. Symptoms are often attributed to laziness. There is a lack of funding for research despite it being estimated that 10 million children in mainland China have the disability. Currently, there are no policies to support dyslexic children on the mainland, as compared to other places such as Hong Kong. Here, children diagnosed with dyslexia are eligible for financial support, special assistance in class, longer exam times and computer programs that can read their exam questions.

Liang Yueyi, teacher at Weining Dyslexia Education Center explained to Sixth Tone that despite the awareness regarding dyslexia is relatively high in developed cities like Shenzhen compared to most, their community research showed that more than 75% of the residents had never heard of it before. Some had heard of it but still believed that it only affected readers of alphabetic languages.

So how does a Chinese speaker struggle with dyslexia? Looking at the research presented above, a dyslexic Chinese speaker will have trouble with recognizing and mapping meaning and sound on characters. In conclusion, it seems that reading disabilities are present in all languages, but the factors that cause the difficulties can differ.

Sources, further reading:

https://dyslexia.yale.edu/dyslexia/what-is-dyslexia/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dyslexia-lost-translation-how-chinese-dyslexic-from-rubin-mathias

https://www.neatorama.com/2009/10/12/english-and-chinese-dyslexia-are-very-different/

https://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/latest/dyslexia-in-chinese

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001806

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030421-065648

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030421-065648

https://medium.com/@longfengfudi/chinese-speakers-and-dyslexia-a5734b9e53ce