Tracy Packiam Alloway, PhD

I agree that the level of difficulty of English is higher resulting in a higher diagnosed rate of dyslexia in English speaking countries.I am much less comfortable in concluding that “a difficulty in processing and remembering the sounds of phonemes” is the only dyslexia factor of importance therefore dyslexia is an English language problem.

As you say ,”Brain imaging studies have found dyslexics in different languages (English, French and Italian) all showed the same brain deficits involving difficulty in processing verbal information.” where English is not a factor and the implication that dyslexia is not only an English language problem.

I believe that the difference in numbers is simply because not all the children in a particular school were formally tested; weak ones were only identified by teachers when a learning problem is obvious. It might be more obvious with English because the letters don’t always have the same sounds. A child having problems in another language might not have such an OBVIOUS problem, and is thus not identified.

I know a Chinese child whose family speaks nothing but Chinese at home, and yet he could not pick up Chinese and prefers English, to the point that his family had to learn English to speak with him! He is unable to discern similar-sounding tones, thus Chinese is confusing to him. (Different tone = different meaning.) He sometimes pronounces English words with the wrong tones as well, but at least he can make himself understood.