Dyslexia is a well-known but often misunderstood learning difficulty that makes it difficult to process and comprehend verbal information. So what does this mean for dyslexics looking to learn a foreign language?
The word ‘dyslexia’ itself is made up of two parts: ‘dys’ meaning not or difficult, and lexia which means ‘language’ or ‘reading’. Together, this literally translates as ‘difficulty with words’.
Dyslexia is believed to develop during the early stages of fetal development and is linked to certain genes. It’s important to remember that there is no correlation between dyslexia and the level of intelligence of a person. In fact, dyslexics tend to be very creatively-minded.
Around 15-20% of the population has a reading disability.
Studies have found that dyslexia primarily targets the left hemisphere of the brain. Those who are good readers have a higher activation in the left hemisphere while showing less activity in the right. Alternatively, when analysing the brain of a dyslexic, it becomes clear that there are disruptions in the left hemisphere which interrupts the ability to read fluently, phonological processing, as well as there being less memory storage capacity to hold such language.
On the other hand, there is more activation in the right hemisphere, which is less efficient in processing language. This is believed to be a compensation method for the lack of activation in the left hemisphere.
The left hemisphere is mainly used for reading alphabetic language.
While the left hemisphere of the brain is specialised in speech and language, the right hemisphere is activated during tasks that have to do with creativity and the arts. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that dyslexics are more creatively minded. But what does this mean when it comes to learning a foreign language? It is a case of using different methods, or is it a lost cause?
In the BBC’s radio documentary, Dyslexia: Language and Childhood, the journalist Toby Withers speaks to Alex who was born in the UK but grew up in Japan. His dyslexia affects his English but not his Japanese.
Francisca Serrano, a professor at the University of Granada, said that this was down to the characteristics of written Japanese. It is clear that written English is vastly different from written Japanese, with the distinguishing factor being its writing system which takes on a different alphabet. It is this factor that makes it easier for a dyslexic person to speak and understand the language.
Languages such as Spanish, English, Italian, and German are alphabetic languages.
Japanese, however, has two different types of characters that make up its writing system. These are kana and kanji. Consequently, Japanese differs from English by the fact that it is a logographic language.
For your average learner who speaks English as a mother tongue, learning a language like Japanese is a little bit more complicated than learning a romance language, like French or Catalan. In fact, it requires using a completely different part of your brain that you would not use when learning a language of the same alphabet.
Learning a logographic language requires an extra step.
It would be extremely difficult to learn your typical Japanese/Chinese greetings without learning the characters (unless using Pingyan or an equivalent writing system). Learning these languages requires the process of memorisation and not learning the structure of the sounds.
The most recent studies on this topic show that the difference between reading a language like Chinese and an alphabetic language is that Chinese uses the bilateral region of the brain.
Languages such as Chinese and Japanese require use to be more visual. In fact, we have to learn the characters as pictures - something that we do not do in English.
For this reason, in Alex's case, it is possible for those with dyslexia to be dyslexic in English but not in a language such as Japanese as the learning process requires different steps. For logographic language, the right hemisphere is used alongside the left hemisphere. As a dyslexic brain processes words as images, these languages work in their favour as they are required to be learnt and processed as images in order to learn the language.
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