Dyslexia could disappear in Chinese

[dogjones]

Found this on boing boing. Interesting, if shown to be right - it appears to imply that dyslexia in an English speaker could indicate a genetic predisposition to learn a Chinese-type language and vice versa? If it's a hereditary condtion, could it be due to a gene that's crossed over from some ancestor who hailed from the different linguistic background? Could you do a study looking at historical rates of dyslexia in society A, (with, say an alphabet-type language), and see if they have increased with integration, maybe immigration figures, from society B (with a symbol-type language)?

 

[Wolfman]

Sorry, Dogjones, but I think you've entirely misunderstood the article. Its not saying that people have a genetic predisposition for one kind of language or another; nor that an English-speaker with dyslexia should learn Chinese.

What it is saying is that the parts of the brain that are involved in learning to read English are different than the parts of the brain that are involved in learning Chinese. Therefore, treatments that can be used to help English-speaking dyslexics may not be useful for Chinese-speaking dyslexics (and vice-versa).

But I think this does demonstrate that people are too quick to lump everything together under one label, "dyslexia". It could, in fact, turn out that the causes of "Chinese dyslexia" are quite different than those of "English dyslexia"...different genes, different areas of the brain, different treatments, etc. Which would seem, to me, to justify identifying them as entirely different conditions, and not continuing to simply lump them all together under one title.

And it raises a valid question even with English speakers who have dyslexia as to whether what we call dyslexia could, in fact, be several different conditions that just happen to manifest similar symptoms?