According to the new findings, issued in Monday’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dyslexia affects different parts of children’s brains depending on whether they read English or Chinese and the therapists will need to use different methods of assisting dyslexic children form different cultures.

“This result was very astounding to us. We had never expected that dyslexics’ brains were different for children who read in English and Chinese,” stated lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and mental sciences at the University of Hong Kong. “Our finding presents neurobiological traces to the cause of dyslexia.”

Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability that creates problems in reading, spelling, writing and uttering words. Millions of children worldwide are affected by this disease and according to International Dyslexia Association it is not known the exact number but estimates range from 8 percent to 15 percent of students.

English as an alphabetic language requires different skills in reading while reading Chinese requires different, the later relies less in sound representation and uses symbols to represent words instead.

Tan explained, past studies had suggested that the brain might use different networks of neurons in different languages, but none had suggested a difference in the structural parts of the brain involved.

Tan’s research group analyzed the brains of students raised reading Chinese, using functional magnetic tone imaging. They then compared those discoveries with similar studies of the brains of students raised reading English.

Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University in Washington, said the process of becoming a skilled reader changes the brain.

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 deals with it differently.
“The suggestion 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,” Eden stated.
That means, “We cannot just assume that any dyslexic child is going to be helped by the same kind of intrusion,” she said in a telephone interview.

In their paper, the researchers marked that imaging studies of the brains of dyslexic children with alphabetic languages like English have identified unusual function and structure in the left temporo-parietal areas, thought to be concerned in letter-to-sound conversions in reading; left middle-superior temporal cortex, thought to be involved in speech sound analysis, and the left inferior temporo-occipital gyrus, which may function as a quick word-form detection system.

When they offered similar imaging studies on dyslexic Chinese youngsters, on the other hand, they found disruption in a different area, the left middle frontal gyrus region.
The study was sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the University of Hong Kong.

A recent Indian movie “Taare Zameen Par” is a worth watching attempt on this subject.
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