WASHINGTON — Dyslexia affects different parts of children’s brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese.
That finding, reported in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, means that therapists may need to seek different methods of assisting dyslexic children from different cultures.
“This finding was very surprising to us,” 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.”
Millions of children worldwide are affected by dyslexia, a language-based learning disability that can include problems in reading, spelling, writing and pronouncing words.
Reading an alphabetic language such as English requires different skills than reading Chinese, which relies less on sound representation, instead using symbols to represent words.
Past studies have suggested that the brain may use different networks of neurons in different languages, but none has suggested a difference in the structural parts of the brain involved, Tan said.
“The implication here is that when we see a reading disability, we see it in different parts of the brain, depending on the writing system that the child is born into,” said Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University in Washington, who was not part of Tan’s research team on this paper.
That means, she said, “we cannot just assume that any dyslexic child is going to be helped by the same kind of intervention,” she said.
