Dyslexia may show a different face in different languages

Abstract

Since research into dyslexic difficulties has been conducted predominately among those whose first language is English, assumptions may have been made about the nature of dyslexia which are dependent on the complex features of that language. This paper considers first a sample of 'transparent' languages without those particular inconsistencies of phoneme-grapheme correspondence: they seem to produce fewer children with problems but nevertheless do present some different inconsistencies of their own. Another 'opaque' language (French) is shown to present different problems from English. Finally, the paper considers what the difficulties for dyslexics could be in countries with languages having a morphemic script, e.g. Chinese and Japanese kanji. It is suggested that more research is needed into the ways in which particular languages generate particular dyslexic manifestations.