American Dyslexia Association

Tag: difficulty

  • Dyslexia in different languages

    French, Danish and even English can be hard for dyslexics students while Spanish, German and Italian may be easier.

    Dyslexia in different languages

    It becomes more and more evident that dyslexia, being the same to its core all over the world, also depends on how difficult the language is to learn and to read. Between languages, there are differences in the orthographic, phonological, morphemic and inflectional structure, but what makes them harder or easier to learn is also the “opaqueness”: how possible it is to break the words up into sounds and how well those sounds match the letters and letter combinations. For example, French, Danish and even English can be hard for dyslexics students while Spanish, German and Italian may be easier.

    Different languages, dyslexia and spelling transparency

    Danish speakers are sometimes said to swallow their consonants, making it a bit of a challenge for learners to hear which words they are using. Looking at a danish word on paper you won’t necessarily know how to say it out loud. The same goes for French with it’s je peux (I can), il peut (he can) and un peu (a little), pronounced in the same way (x and t silent) but with different meanings. Dyslexics students, as well as English students, often struggle with the irregular spelling of the language. They often feel the need for an extensive repertoire of strategies to overcome the challenge.

    Studies are being done on dyslexia in different languages but there is still much left to discover. Such as how dyslexia looks like in languages that are written in another direction, like Arabic, or in a language that doesn’t have an alphabet, such as Mandarin. Learning Chinese you must match the meaning and sound to a specific character, which in fact results in a perhaps more complicated and severe disorder than that of English dyslexics.

    Continue reading here https://cpen.com/insights/dyslexia-in-different-languages/

  • Why Dyslexia Is More Than a Reading Disorder

    Gary Waters—Getty Images/Ikon Images

    People with dyslexia have difficulty reading letters and words; it’s a learning disability that has nothing to do with their intelligence. Until recently, researchers assumed the challenge could be traced to language difficulties, including problems processing printed words, and they focused their attention on the language parts of the brain.

    But in the latest research published in the journal Neuron, scientists led by John Gabrieli, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that dyslexia may be due to a much broader difference in brain function. After analyzing functional MRI brain scans of people with and without dyslexia, they found that those with dyslexia were less adept at something called adaptive learning. When the brain sees something new, whether it’s a word, object, voice or experience, it expends a lot of neural energy to gather as much information about the novel stimulus as possible. But if it does this every time it hears the same voice, or encounters the same dog barking, for example, that wouldn’t be efficient. It’s therefore able to adapt and quickly triage new encounters from familiar ones.

    Gabrieli found that in the brains of dyslexics, this process wasn’t occurring when they heard the same person speak different words. Nor did it occur in other tests of the brain’s plasticity, or ability to adapt. That suggests that the trouble with reading has less to do with language specific problems but rather broader issues with adaptivity. In other words, the issues with adapting to new things may compromise skills like reading.

    Continue reading here: https://time.com/4608060/dyslexia-reading-disorder/