Brain activity across languages
By Lumos Labs Science Associate, Paul Li, MS Neuroscience.
Different languages are represented differently across the brain. This is especially true for languages that are very dissimilar, such as English and Chinese. English is learned from pronouncing its 26-letter alphabet, whereas to learn the Chinese language, one needs to memorize thousands of characters in order to understand a string of pictographs.
Dyslexia, a learning disability that causes difficulty in reading and writing, affects the brain in different ways according to language. Professor Li-Hai Tan, along with his research team from the University of Hong Kong, discovered that Chinese-speaking dyslexics have a different pattern of brain activity than English-speaking dyslexics. Professor Tan told Lumos Labs that “the left middle frontal gyrus, rather than the posterior brain regions, is a perpetrator of reading disorders in Chinese, suggesting the possibility that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese reading would not be in alphabetic language reading, and vice versa.” One implication is that different interventions may be more or less suitable depending on language.
May 25, 2008
I teach English as an Additional Language to foreign students at a university and have seen this problem with my Chinese students. Many words they spell in English have a couple of letters turned around, eg. “ture” instead of “true”, “gril” instead of “girl”.
Aug 19, 2008
Apparently learning new things makes people happy so chinese might be happier cos they got so much to learn and always learning something new.
May 25, 2009
English is my second language i have problems with dyslexia but I find that m problem affects my problem solving more due to getting numbers reversed since I can read words upside down and in revere and understand them thanks to practice of the english language and verbalization of words my attention span and ability to read are limited though since I can not read with speed and undestand what I read
May 26, 2009
research I have seen about English speaking dyslexia also suggests that dyslexics use the front part of the brain rather than the sides. I programme I have been using with my students Fast ForWord claims to shift the usage to the sides. I have seen some good results so far.