Dyslexia
I’ve had this conversation a dozen times with friends. Chances are so have you. It starts when someone asks if there’s such a thing as dyslexia in the Mandarin-speaking world. After all, if dyslexia means mixing up letters, and there are no letters, then there must be no dyslexia, right?
This came across my Twitter radar earlier today. It was a quick conversation between Matthew Stinson and Kane Gao, the latter having provided fodder for posts in the past. Today it was about why there seems to be few (if any) known cases (in the mass-consumer English speaking world) of dyslexia among Chinese speakers.
Dyslexia is not actually a single disorder characterised by swapping letters. If it were just this, then the common (but false) argument that Chinese is dyslexia-proof would make some sense. In fact, someone with dyslexia would likely have the ability to read and write, but with much greater effort expended on the task. From Wikipedia:
Reading disabilities, or dyslexia, is the most common learning disability, although in research literature it is considered to be a receptive language-based learning disability.[14] Researchers at MIT found that people with dyslexia exhibited impaired voice-recognition abilities.
Matthew (via Twitter) linked to a 2009 article in Scientific American touching on the topic of dyslexia in Chinese speakers. Here’s one relevant section:
Chinese dyslexia may be much more complex than the English variety…
English speakers who have developmental dyslexia usually don’t have trouble recognizing letters visually, but rather just have a hard time connecting them to their sounds.
…
Researchers looking at the brains of dyslexic Chinese children have discovered that the disorder in that language often stems from two separate, independent problems: sound and visual perception.
The Scientific American piece is actually a writeup of a more formal paper on the topic in Volume 19, Issue 19 of Current Biology. From the original:
Our study … demonstrates that developmental dyslexia in Chinese is typically characterized by the co-existence of visuospatial and phonological disorders in a dyslexic child. This pattern of behavioral and pathophysiological profiles is different from that in English dyslexia, which is generally associated with a core phonological deficit in the absence of abnormal visual processing.
I’ve always been fascinated by the kind of learning disabilities that are somewhat directly linked to language and language learning, and how these disabilities manifest in significantly different language environments. I recently read Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes about his experiences with the Pirahã people and language which, due to tonality and other features, can be hummed or whistled. The whole time I was reading it I just kept thinking: imagine Braille for Pirahã; .::…:.:::.:…: might be a completely reasonable pattern.
Anyway, the next time you hear the conversation at the university café or the early afternoon expat bar about whether Mandarin speakers can be dyslexic, now you know. Not only can dyslexia affect Mandarin speakers, it can affect them just as severely as it affects Anglophones.
The kid in the Scientific American article does not have dyslexia, by the way. The photo was grabbed off flickr. That’s just what his handwriting looks like.
I know from my reading on Japanese that there are two types of aphasics: ones who can’t read kana and ones who can’t read Kanji. Mandarin probably has the same thing, with the difference in cognitive processing showing through in the ability to process Pinyin/bopomofo and Hanzi.
I am an English teacher in the process of adopting our Chinese son. We brought him home from the hospital at 5 months and he was developmentally delayed. While on the surface he seems like any happy, bi-lingual 7 year old,(his verbal skills are above average for English and average for Chinese) he has recently been diagnosised as dyslexic. This affects him in both languages and he has difficulties recognizing Hanzi character and equal difficulty in writing them. There isn’t alot of information available in Chinese about this issue in China and what information that is available indicates that the Chinese are using western testing methods to determine if a child is dyslexic. Apparently it does exist among the Chinese but it has only been recently identified in the same way that mental problems and mental handicaps are being better diagnosised than perhaps 10 or 20 years ago. There is information available but I have not explored it all. I know it exists and I recognize some signs of dyslexia among my college students. It can be overcome in either language. It just takes time and effort to assist the learner.
Thanks for the comments, both.
Nate,
Perhaps that’s the case. Anything I’ve read on the topic doesn’t mention pinyin. The bigger takeaway may be the knowledge that dyslexia isn’t simply letter-swapping that slows down reading, like it’s usually thought of among the average English speaker. I’m sure there would be some difference in processing bopomofo from hanzi, as you suggest.
Alice,
Sorry for my confusion. How old is he now? I’m not sure if you mean “like any happy, bi-lingual 7 year old” to mean he’s 7 and like his peers, or if he’s still <1 but is quite outgoing. I'm not sure how long the adoption process might take, or if you're in China or elsewhere, so for me your comment actually raises more questions than it answers. Quite curious though, so I hope you'd be willing to tell us a bit more.
I am sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. My time on the internet is quite limited. Our Chinese son is 7 years old and will be eight in October. He speaks English better than his Chinese peers and comprehends more English. He speaks Chinese at about the same level as his peers. His verbal skills are excellent. As I mentioned, when we brought him home from the hospital at the age of 5 months, he was developmentally delayed in many different catagories. My specialty is Early Childhood Education and Language Acquistion so we began to work with him. In many ways he appears to be quite intelligent but in other aspects there are gaps in his learning and his ability to learn. I have been working with him and recording these gaps and delays. We had him tested at a local hospital in order to confirm that he was dyslexic. He not only reverses letters but has other issues that indicate that he is dyslexic which I was able to determine from the test results and my own research. He is affected in both languages. With Chinese pinyin, he often reverses letters and sounds and can’t recognize the pinyin. With Hanzi characters, he does reversals and becomes confused and frustrated when he can’t distinguish differences in characters. He did have a problem with numbers but we have used some innovative methods to assist him and he has learned to recognize and write them better. He does all the classic dyslexia indicators- down is up, back is front, right and left are hard for him,-literally everything that is abstract has to be put into a concrete model and demonstrated repeatedly until somehow he is able to make a connection. You literally see his eyes light up when he finally grasps a concept or an idea.
We are living in China. The adoption process has been quite long for a number of reasons. If you have time for a lengthy short story then I could explain but I don’t want to bother you with details unless you are truly interested. Thank you for asking. The doctor that tested him gave him an IQ score of just over 70. Those who know our son totally disagreed with the test results. You would not know that if you talked with him. He is amazing child and I am grateful that we are blessed with him.
Alice,
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I hope things go well for you in the future.