Reading disability(dyslexia)HELP

[Sally Olsen]

Now that you mention it EH, I have found that many students with dyslexia are able to pick up on accents very quickly. Would be worthwhile to study. They are also super aware of body language although they don't always interpret it correctly. If you are mad, they often interpret it as being mad at them no matter what the circumstances. I used to sit behind my students if I was ever required to give them a test because they could often tell from my slight reactions that the answer they gave was wrong. I suppose it is a survival skill in trying to fit in, as might be case with the accent. Strange though because I am so terrible with sounds - I failed my first linguistics course because I couldn't hear the difference between some of the sounds in the International alphabet and couldn't sound them out to read them when I was trying to learn a new language.

It is interesting that you say it is a visual problem as well. I have discovered that I have Irlen Syndrome which is a sensitivity to light and that I don't process turquoise from the light spectrum. With the addition of turquoise filters on my glasses (for old age), I can read almost anything now and wish I had known about this in my youth. Almost 75% of my dyslexic students are helped with these coloured filters. Of course, each student has a different colour or different shade of the colour. In some students is it almost a miracle because they can't read anything before trying the colours and then can read anything after they get the colour. I wish this test for colour processing was more widely known and tried.

[EH]

Sally Olsen:
You have the colored glasses, huh? I heard about those back in grad school. Of course, my professors in the speech-language pathology dept were pretty sceptical of them ("No, no! It's sounds! Everything related back to sounds!" ...typical speechie attitude... although I'm guilty of it myself as well...). But the glasses thing did sound intriguing. Do you go to a regular eye shop to get tested for that, or do you have to go to someone who specializes in dyslexia?

On the accents, I do have a theory. It's just a theory, mind you. But I know that one of the reasons dyslexics have trouble with sounds is that their categorical perception and production is different from that of other folks. For instance, whereas most native English speakers clearly differentiate between /E/ and /ae/ (although they may say it slightly differently each time, each sound's category is firmly fixed in their minds), people with dyslexia often slightly overlap those two sound categories in their minds; their /E/ category is not so clearly different from their /ae/ category. Knowing this, I thought that maybe when some dyslexics learn foreign sound categories they don't have as much of a rigid, first-language bias about what sound categories must be. As people with looser categorical perceptions and productions, they're used to groping around sounds all the time, and new foreign sounds would be just more of the same. Does that make sense? I don't know. It's just a theory.

-EH

[thethinker]

But I know that one of the reasons dyslexics have trouble with sounds is that their categorical perception and production is different from that of other folks. -EH

What exactly do you mean by all this? Are you saying that dyslexics have problems perceiving the differences between /e/ and /ae/ when they hear them? And that they also have trouble producing the two sounds distinctly in speech? (e.g. They wouldn't be able to reliably hear the difference between the words "bet" and "bat", or produce the two words accurately.) If so, then this doesn't sound like dyslexia, but a completely differenct kind of language disorder - one that does not involve only reading and writing.

[EH]

Exactly! Dyslexia does not only affect reading and writing. It's a different neural organization, which tends to create strengths in some areas (sometimes musical intelligence, emotional intelligence, creativity, etc.) and weaknesses in others (language learning, phonological skills, etc.). Every person is different, but these trends are often visible.

And yes, I am saying that many dyslexics have trouble hearing the differences between sounds. It's a very subtle thing, one that might not even be noticed when talking with real people in the context of full conversations. But when you do studies that have dyslexics listen to isolated sound in synthesized speech, this really pops out at you. Synthesized speech is great because you can specifically manipulate all the formants (sound wave peaks) so sounds are more like or less like "perfect" examples of themselves. For instance, you can make a sound that is in the middle of the /E/ category, or you can make one that is halfway into the /ae/ category. It's all very exact and measurable. And native speakers without dyslexia pretty much all agree on where the boundaries are between the sounds they hear ("This one is definitely a /E/. This one is definitely a /ae/"). Dyslexics, though, are less sure about which sound is which when the two sounds are made to seem really similar to each other. They have to think about it for longer. And sometimes their answers are quite different from the non-dyslexics'. This is what I mean by a difference in categorical perception.

[thethinker]

Thanks EH, that's very interesting. Perhaps you could let us know the details of the studies you mention, because I'd be interested to learn more about it. You don't really answer my question about differentiating /e/ and /ae/, though. It's one thing to not agree on where the boundaries are, but another to actually have a problem perceiving the difference between and producing minimal pairs like "bet" and "bat". Dyslexics, I'm guessing, CAN accurately produce and perceive such pairs, or they would have real problems communicating verbally on a very basic level. So what are the ramifications of this phenomenon - what does it actually affect in dyslexics?

[EH]

Sorry. I thought I was answering your question when I wrote, "It's a very subtle thing, one that might not even be noticed when talking with real people in the context of full conversations." But I guess I wasn't very clear. Hopefully I do a better job below.

You said it's one thing to not agree on where the boundaries are, but another to perceive and produce the differences between sounds. I would say those are actually the same thing, not different at all. Every time you hear a sound, you have to instantly decide what sound it is you're hearing. If the sound you hear closely matches the idea of a certain sound that you've stored in your mind, then your identification of the heard sound is completely subconscious and instantaneous. But if the sound you hear sort of matches one sound in your mind, yet sort of matches another sound in your mind, then IDing the sound you hear will take longer and maybe even be effortful. You might eventually ID the sound correctly, but in the meantime you've used up time and effort that could be used on other tasks, such as figuring out the meaning of what was said. The time periods I'm talking about are extremely short, even when categorical perception is really weak. But if there are enough sounds coming at you at the same time then the extremely short time periods add up.

Anyway, you asked specifically whether dyslexics can perceive and produce the minimal pair "bet/bat". Some can. But some absolutely cannot. Younger kids with dyslexia, expecially, have trouble with this. The ramifications include decreased spelling skills and decoding (reading) skills, with subsequent decreases in reading comprehension and written organization [if the mind is completely occupied with decoding or spelling, then comprehension or written organization don't get enough attention].

You also asked about specific details of the studies. Here are a couple abstracts from PubMed (hopefully it's okay to copy them here...? I figure it's for research purposes, so it's not a copyright violation). If you want to do a search yourself, go to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez and search for: dyslexia categorical perception.

Cognition. 2005 Jun 29; [Epub ahead of print]
Categorical perception of speech sounds in illiterate adults.
Serniclaes W, Ventura P, Morais J, Kolinsky R.
CNRS, Laboratoire de Psychologie Experimentale, CNRS-Paris V (UMR 8581), 71 Avenue Edouard Vaillant, Boulogne-Billancourt, 92774 Cedex, France.

Children affected by dyslexia exhibit a deficit in the categorical perception of speech sounds, characterized by both poorer discrimination of between-category differences and by better discrimination of within-category differences, compared to normal readers. These categorical perception anomalies might be at the origin of dyslexia, by hampering the set up of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, but they might also be the consequence of poor reading skills, as literacy probably contributes to stabilizing phonological categories. The aim of the present study was to investigate this issue by comparing categorical perception performances of illiterate and literate people. Identification and discrimination responses were collected for a /ba-da/ synthetic place-of-articulation continuum and between-group differences in both categorical perception and in the precision of the categorical boundary were examined. The results showed that illiterate vs. literate people did not differ in categorical perception, thereby suggesting that the categorical perception anomalies displayed by dyslexics are indeed a cause rather than a consequence of their reading problems. However, illiterate people displayed a less precise categorical boundary and a stronger lexical bias, both also associated with dyslexia, which might, therefore, be a specific consequence of written language deprivation or impairment.
PMID: 15993403 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]


J Exp Child Psychol. 2004 Apr;87(4):336-61.
Allophonic mode of speech perception in dyslexia.
Serniclaes W, Van Heghe S, Mousty P, Carre R, Sprenger-Charolles L.
CNRS-LEAPLE, UMR 8606, and Universite Rene Descartes, 94801 Paris, France. [email protected]

Perceptual discrimination between speech sounds belonging to different phoneme categories is better than that between sounds falling within the same category. This property, known as "categorical perception," is weaker in children affected by dyslexia. Categorical perception develops from the predispositions of newborns for discriminating all potential phoneme categories in the world's languages. Predispositions that are not relevant for phoneme perception in the ambient language are usually deactivated during early childhood. However, the current study shows that dyslexic children maintain a higher sensitivity to phonemic distinctions irrelevant in their linguistic environment. This suggests that dyslexic children use an allophonic mode of speech perception that, although without straightforward consequences for oral communication, has obvious implications for the acquisition of alphabetic writing. Allophonic perception specifically affects the mapping between graphemes and phonemes, contrary to other manifestations of dyslexia, and may be a core deficit.

PMID: 15050458 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

[Sally Olsen]

Fascinating reading. It does strike a chord with my own experience. I didn't realize this of course until I started to teach adults with dyslexia and found that I couldn't reliably teach what the sounds were. I took some training on Autoskill and found that the overlearning helped me a great deal but I think it has gradually faded and I would need to do it again to be really good at it. It doesn't affect my verbal communication I don't think but then I could have adapted and just not notice it anymore. It does come up when I am learning a new language and someone tries to pin me down to learning the sounds rather than words or phrases or sentences. I think I learned to read with sight words in the old *beep* and Jane readers and so was in a phase of schooling where they didn't emphasize phonics. Lucky me.

The coloured glasses work, I think, because nowadays most written communication is printed on white paper with black ink. White is all the colours and black is the absence of colour so when I don't process the turquoise it makes the lines go closer together and the j's go down into the next line and the f's go up. I have to use my finger to keep my place. Also I seem to want to read left to right rather than right to left. That all changes with the colour in my glasses. Some students say that the letters seem to be running off the page or going in circles or floating off the page. I guess it is just visual distortions depending on the colour or colours you don't process. It is a private business though run by the Irlen Foundation and you can only get tested by Irlen testers. I guess you would have to go to the web page to find out one in your area. It is expensive, unfortunately.

I don't have the same problem on the computer because I can increase the font size and change the background colour.

[Andrew Patterson]

There seems to be a lot of ideas floating around here. I note, that Polish students have difficulty distinguishing between the vowels described by virtue of their not making the distinction in their own language. This seems to encompass a difficulty in distinguishing the spelling of a and e too, indeed Poles very often write these two letters in almost the same way despite having both letters in their own alphabet. I don't know what conclusions one can draw from that. Presumably this is an L1 issue but perhaps a missing pathway rather than interference. There would be no need to develop or retain a pathway that you are not going to use in your mother tongue. Native English speakers lack an analagous ability to distinguish between sounds that in Polish are written:
1) sz and ś
2) cz and ć

To a native English speaker these sound like sh and ch respectively. I still struggle to hear the difference.

I hear that it is possible to be dyslexic in one language, but not another. The example I heard of was a person who was bilingual in English and Chinese, though I can't remember much about what I heard.

This definitely wasn't the case for one dyslexic student I taught, but there have been others who claimed to be dyslexic yet (the difficulty in distinguishing vowel sounds and the use of the letters a and e notwithstanding) showed little or no signs of dyslexia in English - either through difficulty in reading or especially poor ordering of ideas.

Sally,
I presume the organisation you were talking about is the one at this URL:
http://www.dyslexiaservices.com.au/

If you don't mind my asking, I'm interested in your own experience of perceptual dyslexia:
1) Is this a purely visual thing, or auditory as well?
2) Is the ordering of ideas affected with perceptual dyslexia?

I noticed that you were talking about background colours:
3) Do font colours affect a dyslexic's ability to read as well?

Thanks.

[EH]

It is possible to be dyslexic in one language but not another. English has one of the highest rates of dyslexia, partially due to better diagnosis capabilities (more professionals to do it), but mostly because it has more irregularities than other alphabetic languages. Italian, for example, has a much, much lower rate of dyslexia. I also read an interesting article once about a case study of a boy raised (equally) bilingually and biscriptally from birth, but was dyslexic only in English and not in Japanese. In fact, he had really high level Japanese reading and writing skills.

[fluffyhamster]

Interesting stuff, EH. I'd be curious to hear your opinion about why the boy got along so well with Japanese but not English (Japanese has its share of difficulties...but ultimately they would seem to be of of a different kind, ne!).

Kind of related Language Log article: click on link below's first, "ideologies of linguistic uniqueness" link, then on the next one's second, "Eric Bakovic took Richard Lederer to task..." link, to get to the "English: International and simple" article itself (I could've posted just the last, but you'd then be missing the subsequent and related LL articles!). Bakovic's email exchange with Lederer is, as Liberman says, 'good fun, well worth reviewing.'
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 02587.html

[Andrew Patterson]

I've just listened to the Nov 1st edition of the learning curve on radio 4 and they had a piece on "Meares-Irlen syndrome," which can be improved using coloured plastic sheets or glasses, they said that it wasn't dyslexia. I wonder if this is what you have, Sally.

Sally, you never got back to me about whether coloured fonts help too, do they?

Anyway, if you or anyone else is interested in listening it is at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/learningcurve.shtml

Don't miss the Essex university link:
http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/overlays/

[EH]

fluffyhampster: (what a name, by the way!)
Here's the PubMed abstract for the article I mentioned, if you're interested (again copied here for research purposes only, so please, I hope no one accuses me of copyright violations):

Cognition. 1999 Apr 1;70(3):273-305.
A case study of an English-Japanese bilingual with monolingual dyslexia.
Wydell TN, Butterworth B.
Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University, Middlesex, UK. [email protected]
We report the case of AS, a 16 year-old English/Japanese bilingual boy, whose reading/writing difficulties are confined to English only. AS was born in Japan to a highly literate Australian father and English mother, and goes to a Japanese selective senior high school in Japan. His spoken language at home is English. AS's reading in logographic Japanese Kanji and syllabic Kana is equivalent to that of Japanese undergraduates or graduates. In contrast, his performance in various reading and writing tests in English as well as tasks involving phonological processing was very poor, even when compared to his Japanese contemporaries. Yet he has no problem with letter names or letter sounds, and his phoneme categorisation is well within the normal range of English native speakers. In order to account for our data that show a clear dissociation between AS's ability to read English and Japanese, we put forward the 'hypothesis of granularity and transparency'. It is postulated that any language where orthography-to-phonology mapping is transparent, or even opaque, or any language whose orthographic unit representing sound is coarse (i.e. at a whole character or word level) should not produce a high incidence of developmental phonological dyslexia.
Publication Types:
Case Reports
PMID: 10384738 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]


I haven't read the actual article in a couple years, to be honest, but reviewing the abstract I see that the authors emphasize the type of sound-symbol correspondence in their analysis of why the kid had only monolingual dyslexia. They seem to think that a bunch of sounds (mora, not syllable in Japanese, is that right? I don't speak it.) linked to one symbol (kana/ kanji) is easier for people with phonological impairments than one sound linked to one symbol (letter), as is the case in many English words. The abstract is really brief, though. I recommend reading the whole article if you can get it out of the library. I remember it as being extremely well written and interesting.

Oh, and your link was so interesting. I didn't realize that Japanese speakers devoiced vowels phonemically. I'd never heard of such a thing. Do you know more about that? It's intriguing.
When I saw that the guy went to UNH I immediately started to doubt his understanding of different languages, even before I read the rest of the article. I have some familiarity with that school. It's great in many ways. However, something like 95% (??) of the students are monolingual, English-speaking, White Americans. In most departments, the faculty members are the same. It's tough to escape that majority culture there, and one would have to go far out of one's way to learn about linguistic/cultural differences.

Andrew Patterson:
You brought up a good point about the definition of dyslexia. From a word origin point of view, the meaning dyslexia should encompass all difficulties with reading. So visual processing disorders that interfere with reading would be included under that umbrella. I personally would agree with that wider definition. But a lot of people, like those mention in your post, would say anything that can be corrected with lenses is not dyslexia; dyslexia would therefore be defined more as a problem based in auditory processing & timing and which has no simple cure. I'd be interested to hear what you and Sally Olsen think--wider definition, or narrower?

[fluffyhamster]

I'm not that good at Japanese yet and am not so familiar with its linguistic terminology, but I think I'd be correct in saying that desu ("dess", as in Atashi wa fluffyhamster desu ) is another example of vowel devoicing, and one that you are more likely to be familiar with than (Bakovic's two examples) futon or sukiyaki (at least as far as Japanese speakers would pronounce them, down to the last dying puff of bento-laced breath).

Japanese script might appear to have its advantages in those kind of controlled experiments, but it's interesting to note that some kanji sometimes have furigana (basically, small hiragana) printed above them, because even those without specific reading/decoding impairments might have difficulty recalling the correct reading/pronunciation for that kanji, even when surrounded by context and perhaps conveying a meaning other than a person's name (although I am presuming that often it is an unusual name that is the problem - to be honest I haven't read enough extended printed Japanese text to be able to do more than hypothesize here, drawing on my limited knowledge of Chinese writing and derived scripts in general); one thing is for sure though, having both monosyllabic and polysyllabic (let's not get into technicalities re. mora!) i.e. multiple readings for many if not most kanji imposes a burden on the memory that Chinese does not (Chinese hanzi always have only monosyllabic, and then also almost always only one pronunciation, although there are changes in "tone sandhi" for certain combinations of characters that complicate the picture slightly).

The "logical" thing would perhaps have been to make more and more use of the kanji-derived kana syllabaries soon after they were invented and became widespread, and eventually jettison the kanji altogether (such a move might have helped increase the range of sounds that could've developed in the language e.g. de+su=des=symbol for des developing?, and thus reduced the resulting problem of "needing" - i.e. always seeming to need - distinct so-called "logographs" to distinguish the jostling homophones somewhat...but the timescale involved is probably too short for this fanciful idea of mine to really hold much water).

DeFrancis has a reasonable potted sketch of the develoment of Japanese writing in his Visible Speech; he explains how the borrowings from various part of China (with their differing dialects and thus pronunciations) across several centuries led to the slew of, for want of a better analogy, 'Latinate' (i.e. Sino-readings, 'on yomi') pronunciations for any one character, to which we can add the additional complications of the Japanese obviously also wanting to read their native words into the new script ('kun yomi'). The result would be as if we were to read the form 'hydr-' as not only 'hydro...' but also 'water' in present-day English (apologies if my grasp of English etymology is so at fault as to make the analogy invalid to some!).

I guess that ultimately, the fact that Chinese is an "isolating" language, and Japanese an "agglutinating" one, had to affect how the latter utilized and "developed" the script that they had borrowed from the former, and explains the resulting lack of a perfect "fit" (consistent correspondence between number of mora and the number of kanji forms used to represent the mora) between spoken and written Japanese.

Some very interesting sample chapters here (I particularly enjoy Unger's stuff):
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/index.html

[fluffyhamster]

EH, I chanced upon this (on vowel devoicing in Japanese):
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=1388

[EH]

Thanks fluffyhampster. Fascinating stuff!