Chinese dyslexic kids harder to treat: Study

Washington, Oct 13 (ANI): Dyslexia in Chinese children might be more complicated and harder to treat than their English-speaking counterparts, say researchers.

The differences can be seen in the brain and in the performance of Chinese children on visual and oral language tasks.

According to Wai Ting Siok of the University of Hong Kong, English dyslexia consists of a "phonological disorder," meaning that people with the condition have trouble detecting or manipulating the sound structure of oral language, which in turn leads to problems in mapping speech sounds onto letters.

However, in contrast, the new findings show that developmental dyslexia in Chinese is really two disorders: a visuospatial deficit and a phonological disorder combined.

"In English, the alphabetic letters that form visual words are pronounceable, so access to the pronunciation of English words is made possible by using letter-to-sound conversion rules," said Siok.

"Written Chinese maps graphic forms-i.e., characters-onto meanings; Chinese characters possess a number of intricate strokes packed into a square configuration, and their pronunciations must be memorized by rote.

"This characteristic suggests that a fine-grained visuospatial analysis must be performed by the visual system in order to activate the characters' phonological and semantic information.

"Consequently, disordered phonological processing may commonly coexist with abnormal visuospatial processing in Chinese dyslexia," Siok added.

During the study, the researchers asked normal and dyslexic Chinese readers to judge the physical size of visual stimuli and found that normal readers performed significantly better than dyslexic readers.

Brain scans showed that, compared with normal readers, dyslexics exhibited weaker activation in a portion of the brain known to mediate visuospatial processing.

Crucially, Siok said, most Chinese dyslexics with the visuospatial problem also exhibited a phonological processing disorder, as demonstrated by their poor performance in a phonology-related rhyme judgment task, suggesting the coexistence of two disorders.

"Our results strongly indicate the need for a unifying theory of sufficient scope to accommodate the full complexity of the observed dysfunctions and interactions of the brain systems underlying reading impairments," Siok added.

The study appears in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. (ANI)