The Simple Neuroscience of Dyslexia
By: @Natalie Wilcox and Brandon Slade - Founder of Untapped Learning
Reading is nothing more than being a code breaker for language. For typical learners, our brains make a cheat sheet of all the code that we know so that we can pull it out whenever we are faced with letters that need to be interpreted. For people with dyslexia, they have to break two codes every time they need to read. First they need to break the code of their own personal cheat sheet, and then use that to decode the text.
But what about languages? Well, one thing we know: English speakers have it really hard. English-speaking countries have some of the highest rates of dyslexia, mostly due to the language itself. In English, there are 44 phonemes or sounds that can be made with 280 different spelling combinations. For instance, let’s look at the “/ü/” sound. This sound can be spelled nine different ways. Moon, screw, blue, flute, shoe, through, fruit, who, maneuver, croup… this is not easy stuff! In Italian, there are 32 phonemes; however, most of them only have one or two spellings per phoneme. In Chinese, we run into another issue of not having a phonological alphabet. So Chinese dyslexia is not only a phonological processing issue, but also a visuospatial processing issue. Reading is predominantly related to an area of the left fusiform gyrus called the visual word form area that is developed with experience. There is also engagement of the arcuate/superior longitudinal fasciculus connecting language regions to higher processing areas.
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