Dyslexia is languague based

Interesting:

By Amanda Gardner, HealthDay Reporter


WEDNESDAY, Sept. 1 (HealthDayNews) -- A new study reveals that cultural factors influence how dyslexia manifests itself by finding that the disorder affects the brains of Chinese and English speakers differently.

"Our findings argue against a simple biological unit theory of dyslexia," said the study's corresponding author, Lihai Tan, a research fellow at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health and associate professor of linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. "Dyslexia is part of culture."

"The findings are very important and innovative," said Guinevere Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning and associate professor of pediatrics at Georgetown University Medical Center. "They provide solid evidence for the fact that the neural basis of reading is complex and will differ depending on the nature of the writing system. After all, reading is not a skill that is innate, and hence the mechanisms that the brain will draw upon to accomplish this task is likely to differ depending on the demands of a particular writing system."

It has been largely assumed that dyslexia, even in different languages, has the same biological underpinning, with many researchers believing the biological root lies in the left temporoparietal region of the brain. Most studies, however, have looked at alphabetic languages such as English and Italian, which rely on phonology, and not Chinese or Japanese, which rely more heavily on orthography, or written symbols.

The new study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain activity of Chinese children as they performed different reading-related tasks. Of 16 children in the fourth and fifth grades at Yuquan Primary School in Beijing, eight were impaired readers while eight were normal readers.

In the first task, children were asked to judge whether two Chinese characters were homophones -- pronounced alike but with different meanings. "This task measures the relationship between the visual shape of characters and the pronunciation," Tan explained.

In the second task, the children were asked to decide if a pair of characters were the same size. "This was supposed to measure the relationship between visual shape and characters' meaning," Tan said.

The left middle frontal gyrus brain region in children with dyslexia was activated, suggesting there is an important neurological difference between impaired English and Chinese readers, the researchers said.

"You wouldn't be completely surprised that different parts of the brain are being activated during [different language] tasks," said Gordon Sherman, executive director of the Newgrange School and Educational Outreach Center in Princeton, N.J. "It's a different task even though it's a language task."

By the end of first grade, Chinese children will learn 600 characters, out of a total of 5,000 to 6,000 needed to be literate, Eden said. That's compared to a paltry 26 letters in the English alphabet. "Chinese have to have a very good visual memory," she said. "Every one of those characters also has multiple meanings, so your brain requirements are different."

The findings have enormous implications for helping impaired readers in China, where 2 percent to 7 percent of children are dyslexic (out of a total population of about 1.4 billion). "Current remediation programs in the U.S. emphasize a phonetics approach," Tan said, adding such an approach probably won't work in China.

The study also highlights the importance of paying attention to differences in languages. Even languages as similar as English and Italian can exhibit differences when it comes to dyslexia. "One study showed that the degree of impairment when reading differed depending on the language," Sherman said. Another case report showed that a boy was dyslexic in English but not in Japanese, Eden pointed out.

"We're tempted to say we've found the answer and move on. This is a wake-up call," Eden said. "This reminds us that this is a very complicated disorder, and we need to keep a very open mind and be ready to come up with a range of interventions. No one intervention is going to help. That's what people keep hoping for, but it's never going to happen."

Source: http://www.klkntv.com/Global/story.asp?S=2247754

Thanks for the interesting link.

Google searching 'dyslexia different languages' brought up loads


It's really interesting, something I'd never considered. I knew it was a language based disorder, but had no idea that the type of language used would produce different effects. It's a term that in many situations is used to describe a basic disorder, and I don't think that many people understand the complexity of it. There is also a number dyslexia

Number dyslexia hits one in 20 children


Tim Radford


The Guardian: 11th September, 2003.

Dyscalculia, the arithmetical equivalent of dyslexia, afflicts about one child in 20 in Britain and could make them cases for special treatment, Brian Butterworth of University College London told the British Association science festival at Salford yesterday.

Most people can recognise three or four objects without needing to count. Dyscalculics cannot. They have trouble manipulating numbers at all.

"Our big success this year has been to get the government to recognise dyscalculia," he said. "This could pave the way for funding to support these kids. These kids find it difficult to count. They think that three plus one is five. They might learn it by rote, but they do not understand why it isn't five. They are misdiagnosed by their teachers as stupid, they are misdiagnosed by their parents as stupid, they think of themselves as stupid, other kids think they are stupid and the daily maths lesson is a daily humiliation for them."

The ability to recognise numbers and see that some numbers or quantities are larger than others is widespread across the animal kingdom: laboratory experiments with monkeys and rats have confirmed that at least one region of the brain has evolved to manipulate number. But some children, competent in other ways, are afflicted by number blindness.

"We have done focus group studies with nine-year-old kids with this condition and I found what they said heartbreaking, they feel so bad about it," Prof Butterworth said. "If we can find a simple way of diagnosing this, and alerting teachers and parents and kids themselves to the problem, we can say it is just like colour blindness, it doesn't show you are stupid.

"Maybe - we do not know this yet - they will never be very good at calculating. However, we know dyscalculics who are good at statistics, who are good at algebra, and we have recently been testing a young woman who got a first class degree in philosophy, including first class marks on the formal logic module, and she has severe dyscalculia."

Prof Butterworth told the conference that in an experiment involving 18,000 people, females were slightly quicker at recognising numbers than males - but only up to three. He and Penny Fidler of the explore@bristol science museum used a touch screen to test the numerical grasp of large numbers of people.

Source: http://www.mathematicalbrain.com/sept03/guardian.html

This is of interest to me because the part of the brain used in typing numbers isn't the same as the one used in writing out equations by hand - maybe I should add I'm a mathematician by training - and solving equations by hand is a lot faster.

It's also of interest because no African language has words for numbers greater than 3 (the native terms are for "1, 2, 3, many") and wonder whether the corresponding lack of mathematical ability might be due to something measurable in the brain.

Thanks for the links.

When I was in kindergarten I learned to count to 10 in Swahili. I think I can remember, moja, mbili, tatu, nne -- something like that. Swahili is an African language and I find it hard to believe it's the only one with numbers greater than three...

(Not even getting into for the moment whether Africans actually lack mathematical ability.)

Check this out:

http://zompist.com/numbers.shtml

Sozobe - you weren't at school before the Arabs and the Indians landed in Africa, many centuries ago, and taught the locals numbers higher than 3, were you?

Of course there are numbers up to infinity NOW, so please refer to original post which clearly states "native".

"It is an undeniable truth that Arab and Persian cultures had greatest influence on the Swahili culture and the Swahili language. To demonstrate the contribution of each culture into the Swahili language, take an example of the numbers as they are spoken in Swahili. "moja" = one, "mbili" = two, "tatu" = three, "nne" = four, "tano" = five, "nane" = eight, "kumi" = ten, are all of Bantu origin. On the other hand there is "sita" = six, "saba" = seven and "tisa" = nine, that are borrowed from Arabic. The Swahili words, "chai" = tea, "achari" = pickle, "serikali" = government, "diwani" = councillor, "sheha" = village councillor, are some of the words borrowed from Persian bearing testimony to the older connections with Persian merchants."

Full link to a history of Swahili: http://www.glcom.com/hassan/swahili_history.html

So what era of African's lack of mathematical ability were you referring to?

Ah, nice link, Cav.

Here is some interesting info on Bantu languages: http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/B/Bantulan.asp

Soz, these are called one, two, many languages and there are a number of them (pun). You might want to take a look at this article.



http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996303

Sozobe - few things are more boring than having to parse in excruciating detail a simple sentence, so for the last time may I refer you to the original post in which the word "corresponding" appears clearly. Thank you.

<shrugs>

A quick clarification:

I don't deny that there are "one, two, many" languages -- interesting link, Acquiunk, thanks. If that was the extent of the statement, that there are such languages and that those who speak only those languages show mathematical limitations, no prob. In fact, very interesting.

But the statement was about African languages in general -- that NO African language has [present tense yours] a number past 3 -- and that seemed at odds with my recollection of Swahili. Cav's link can go either way -- there are native (in your distinction) Bantu words for numbers past 3, but does that mean that the Persian and Arab words replaced Bantu number-words, or that Bantu number-words replaced some of the number-words past three that they were taught by Persians and Arabs? I don't know, personally.

But your sentence construction certainly lends the impression that you are saying that Africans' mathematical ability is lacking -- no time frame given. If that's not what you're saying, cool.

I think the general question regarding the development of African languages is still a bit misunderstood. Let's take pidgin English, for example. It's a dialect.

How to put it...Swahili is a bit like the 'English' of Africa, a language influenced by many sources, and so it became somewhat universal.

As for the actual roots of a lot of Bantu languages, they are very hard to trace. I really don't think that HofT's post meant to infer that Africans' mathematical ability is lacking. I take it as a purely historical comment, which probably has some validity.

Mrs. cav studied linguistics, with a specialty in African languages and their permutations and growth. It's not a question with a lot of solid answers really.

From Acquiunk's very interesting article in the New Scientist:

"...Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study."

I'm surprised that anyone is surprised at this result. Look no further than the Western languages, which have uniformly adopted words from Siberian tribes (tundra, taiga), Japanese (tsunami), Arabic (algebra) and on, and on. We wouldn't be using their terms if we had had the concepts to begin with.

Who's surprised?

Note: substitution is a well-observed phenomenon in mathematical notation, e.g. our substitution of arabic numerals for those used by Greeks and Romans - just think of calculating square roots in Roman numerals! - but that's a distinct subject in no way contradicting the findings stated in the New Scientist article.

Sozobe - if you read the article you'll see that a number of scientists in related fields were in fact surprised. Truly I don't understand why you can't be bothered to read something before commenting on it, so this is the last time I will parse a text for you.