Understanding Chinese dyslexia

Reading and writing are inevitably affected by the features of the orthography in question. This paper aims to examine the manifestation and causes of dyslexia in logographic Chinese. Studies to date have suggested that phonological processing skills are associated with reading difficulties in Chinese as they are in other writing systems. In addition, Chinese dyslexics also appear to be impaired on orthographic processing and rapid naming. In particular, they show difficulties in using knowledge about the internal structures of Chinese characters to read unfamiliar and infrequent words. It is therefore likely that deficits in both orthographic and phonological processing are responsible for reading failure in Chinese. Copyright © 2010 Institute for Cognitive Science, Seoul National University.