The Core Knowledge Blog

A fascinating piece of research reportedly shows dyslexia affects different parts of the brain depending on whether a child is raised learning English or Chinese.

“This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics’ brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese,” said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. “Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was the first to report the study.

The researchers note that reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese. English readers turn letters into sounds, while Chinese uses symbols to represent words. “Becoming a reader is a fairly dramatic process for the brain,” says Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University in Washington, who was not associated with the study. For children, learning to read is culturally important but is not really natural, Eden said, so when the brain orients toward a different writing system it copes with it differently.