I am reasonably familiar with the dyslexia literature, but was not aware that bilinguals can be dyslexic in one language only. Could you summarise the literature on this please? And, if so, does not the dyslexic deficit simply depend on how much phonology there is in a particular language?

Hi Anthony,

that's why i wanted to know more about this topic.

Brian Butterworth and Joey Tang wrote a little bit about this. I know that the ortographic depth is one of the predictor of dyslexia (with much more components, of course). I'm writing an article about dyslexia and learning a foreign language. For this i've made exercises in a foreign language (Spanish in my case) for Croatian children and i was wondering if learning a foreign language with a new metalinguistic approach could help dyslexics not to be dyslexic in this foreign language and this way maybe improve their reading abilities in their mother tongue.

If you have some interesting literature about this topic, i'll be grateful if you could share it with me.

Thanks

PS

I do not have detailed knowledge in this area, so you will probably be better off asking Google. However, I do not know of any language where you do not get dyslexia, and for much the same reason (ie phonological impairment). It would be useful if someone could name any such dyslexic-immune language. There is plenty of evidence that multilinguals can become aphasic in one and not another language.

Google will certainly undertand the question.

thank you for your contribution, it was very usefull.

PS

Although all languages have different phonemes and different rules for combining them, they all have "phonology." The exception is ASL as the deaf can't hear, but even in ASL, there are gestemes which correspond to spoken language phonemes. As for selective dyslexia, it i entirely possible. English orthography is highly inconsistent (see my blogposts on spelling at http://smarthotoldlady.blogpost.com

Spanish, using the same alphabet as English, has far more consistent spellings. It is easier for a bilingual Spanish-English speaker to learn to read in Spanish than in English, for instance. Although I'm not an expert on dyslexia, I have long thought that some dyslexics aren't really dyslexic. They are stymied by the inconsistencies in pronouncing English written words. Indeed, good readers do not read letter by letter. They read in phrases, recognizing the forms of different words, much as Chinese readers have to recognize the form of a written character.

One thing is certain. Phonics is the worst way to combat illiteracy in an English speaker.

Elaine Chaika and Paris Binos you are both onto something! I work to Dx learning disabilities every day! A big part of phonologically based learning disabilities is understanding how complex the language is that you are using with the person involved. Some of the people Dx with a learning disability such as Dyslexia would not have the label in other countries other than the US because the language used in some countries complexity is not so intense or they use a different sign symbol relationship such as Chinese. Remember too that there are different forms of Dyslexia not only in reading but there is dysgraphia and number dyslexia. I think those that suffer from more than one form of Dyslexia would suffer the same trouble no matter the language due to the brain dysfunction/malfunction in reading the "symbols" related to language. Whereas if they only had a reading issue fro left/right reversal they may fare better in other languages with less rules and exceptions (such as American English) or no rules at all. Powerful question that I am sure to follow!

Hi all,

Just wanted to add a few things.

One of the best examples I could direct you towards examples of dyslexia in one language and not another is:

Wydell, T. N., & Butterworth, B. (1999). A case study of an English-Japanese bilingual with monolingual dyslexia. Cognition, 70(3), 273-305.

There are two similar but distinct theories with regards to the manifestation of dyslexia in orthographies with varying degrees of transparency.

Wydell, T. N. (2003). Dyslexia in Japanese and the ‘Hypothesis of Granularity and Transparency’. Dyslexia in different languages: Cross-linguistic comparisons. London: Whurr Publishers.

According to the above hypothesis, orthographies differ in two dimensions: “transparency” and “granularity.” Along the transparency dimension, for any orthography whose print-to-sound mapping is directly one-to-one or transparent, Wydell suggests that there will be a reduced possibility of producing phonological dyslexia.

Ziegler, J. C., & Goswami, U. (2005). Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: a psycholinguistic grain size theory. Psychological bulletin, 131(1), 3.

The psycholinguistic grain size theory states that the availability of different sound units prior to reading, the degree of consistency seen in the associations between the sounds and the symbols of the language and granularity of the language make up the three contributing factors regarding reading development across languages. However this theory is limited thus far to alphabetic scripts.

Hope this helps.

Paris Binos, thank you for your opinion and your contribution to the discussion.

Elaine Chaika, thank you for sharing your blog with us. As for selective dyslexia, with this discussion we're all trying to find a way out of this issue.

Thank you Clara Smalley and let us know if you have experience with selective dyslexia.

Thank you so much Evren Raman for your contribution and for sharing with us your experience about dyslexia. You really helped a lot.