Dyslexia in Chinese: 5 Key Takeaways from Recent Advances (Spotlight Series)

Introduction: is DYSLEXIA a universal condition?

My first close encounter with DYSLEXIA was during my stint as the head of a language department in a secondary school (grade 7 – 10). While not completely unfamiliar with the concept, I didn’t have any practical experience working with dyslexic learners. My understanding of the condition was primarily based on articles written by academic journalists: informative, captivating, yet somewhat detached from my own real-life experiences.

The child, ‘X’, I was working with can be regarded proficient in two languages – if we’re only concerned about oracy. ‘X’ was conversant in a wide range of topics – or maybe just plain talkative. I was astounded, though, when I realised ‘X’ has been diagnosed with dyslexia since grade 2. Somehow, the condition seems to cut across English and Mandarin (I taught ‘X’ Mandarin), where we observed immense challenge in enabling the child connecting what’s known in oracy to what’s written on the page.

The experience of working with ‘X’ kept me wondering. Is DYSLEXIA a universal condition? Is a person who has been diagnosed with DYSLEXIA in one language necessarily dyslexic in all others? Specifically, should DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE be considered separately? As with, say, all other languages?

Spotlight: Recent Advances in CHINESE DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA

This has been somewhat revealed in a recent article I encountered. Five academics from China and the USA collaborated on a comprehensive review of recent advances in CHINESE DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA. To a certain degree, this sheds light on my most initial question. In this spotlight article, let me share on some key takeaways from the article, as well as some of my simple reflections.

Defining DYSLEXIA and DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE (CHINESE DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA)

For a start, let’s understand that DYSLEXIA is a neurological learning disorder characterised by difficulties with reading, writing, and spelling, despite average to above-average intelligence. It’s a specific learning disability that affects an individual’s ability to process written language, often resulting in struggles with decoding and encoding written language.

DYSLEXIA isn’t as rare for English readers as some of us may conceive, and it affects approximately 5-10% of the population. While it cannot be cured, DYSLEXIA can be managed with targeted interventions and accommodations, enabling dyslexic individuals to reach their full potential.

On a related note, DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE generally refers to similar difficulties in processing written Chinese. Just to be clear, the “Chinese language” I’m referring to here doesn’t just refer to Mandarin specifically, but it includes all the Chinese languages – thus all the varieties that share similar orthographical systems.

Notwithstanding such, while DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE shares properties with DYSLEXIA IN ENGLISH, it’s rather recognised by scholars that DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE is also distinguished by other properties, particularly due to the logographic system of written Chinese.

1. Prevalence of DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE

So, to what extent is the Chinese population dyslexic? Accordingly, it’s estimated that CHINESE DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA affect around 4-10% of the Chinese population. To put things in perspective, that is a rather significant number, translating to more than 70 million individuals in if we talk about absolute numbers.

“Later, various studies and epidemiological surveys adopting diagnosis criteria similar to those in English reported consistently that there were similar prevalence rates for Chinese DD (approximately 4–10%) as for alphabetic language communities (approximately 5–10%).”

Zhang et al., 2023: Recent Advances in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia

2. Typical linguistic demands of Reading in Chinese

This particular topic warrants a thorough discussion by itself – say, another long-form article. Here, I’d just draw out some key points from this article that gives non-Chinese educators and learners among us on the challenges of reading in Chinese across 3 dimensions.

Orthographical features

Chinese orthography has distinct features that set it apart from Indo-European languages like English. The logographic writing system of Chinese is composed of characters, which differ significantly from alphabetic words. Each character is made up of strokes, with six basic strokes combined to form more than 50 stroke patterns and eventually characters in a square-shaped space.

“There are approximately 3,000 simplified characters commonly used in Mainland China and approximately 4,500 traditional characters frequently used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao.”

Zhang et al., 2023: Recent Advances in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia

Chinese characters are visually compact and complicated, with subtle visual differences between characters. The multidimensional measure of graph complexity reveals that Chinese script has the greatest visual complexity among 131 writing systems.

Phonological features

Chinese phonology is characterised by its remarkably simple syllable structure, consisting of an optional consonant followed by a mandatory vowel and an optional nasal sound. This structure highlights the centrality of the vowel, while the absence of consonant clusters further underscores the system’s simplicity. That being said, chinese linguists prefer to analyse the syllabic structure in a different manner.

To add on, Chinese is a tonal language, where pitch contours at the syllable level distinguish lexical meanings from otherwise identical strings of phonemes. The implication of such is that pitch (“tones”) can be used to distinguish word meanings.

To make matters worse, the language has a limited number of syllables, resulting in an abundance of homophones, with each syllable having on average five homophones with different meanings. The exact meaning of each syllable is disambiguated in compound words.

Morphological features

“The most salient feature of Chinese morphology is the correspondence between morpheme (the basic semantic unit), syllable (the basic phonological unit), and character (the basic orthographic unit).”

Zhang et al., 2023: Recent Advances in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia

Many linguists depict Chinese languages as morphosyllabic languages, where every morpheme is represented by a syllable and a character. As with its phonological features, Chinese has a large number of homophonic syllables and homographic characters, which are usually only disambiguated in compound words.

Most Chinese words are monosyllabic or bisyllabic, with bisyllabic words accounting for approximately two-thirds of all words. These words are often built on single-syllabic words, and their meanings are formed by integrating the meanings of individual morphemes. Such semantic transparency is a distinct feature of Chinese morphology.

3. Impairments at two levels that caused DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE

For those among us who aren’t familiar with Chinese, reading in Chinese seems daunting. To a certain degree, such a sentiment isn’t exactly overblown – not all languages are made equal when it comes to reading. However, most Chinese do develop the capacity to read given the opportunity for proper reading instruction.

So, what then are the notable deficits demonstrated by individuals with DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE? The article consolidated two main levels of six types of deficits:

Linguistic Level

There are, of course, three types of deficits at this level (corresponding to the features we’ve discussed earlier):

• Orthographic processing deficit: difficulty in orthographic processing has been viewed by some scholars as a dominant deficit for DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE, particularly in recognition of character structures and radical positions (somewhat unique to Chinese learning) which impedes character recognition in general. Estimates of prevalence rates in Chinese dyslexic population are largely variable though, with some studies pinning it at as low as 10% while some with an upper limit of 60%.
• Phonological awareness deficit: There is increasing agreement that phonological awareness deficit can also be regarded a core deficit for DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE, something which is not too different from alphabetic languages. It’s characterised by difficulties in discerning segmental phonemes (consonants and vowels) and suprasegmental phonological units (e.g. initials, tones), although scholars have debated on the relative importance of the various difficulties.
• Morphological awareness deficit: This deficit has received more debates on whether it might be a causal factor of or more a resulting consequence arising from DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE. It’s largely observed in tasks of homophone sensitivity and lexical compounding – features which are more Chinese-specific than others and can contribute to challenge in word segmentation in written Chinese.
• Rapid Automatised Naming deficit: “Rapid Automatised Naming” has been recognised as an important predictor of reading skills, both in alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages. A deficit of this ability, though, has been demonstrated by slow naming speeds and difficulties in retrieving phonological information from long-term memory for the Chinese dyslexic individuals.

Sensory Level

According to the article, scholars have also attempted to identify the fundamental issues that may explain the linguistic deficits – impairments that happen at the sensory levels. There are two main types of deficits in this category:

• Visual Deficits: include visual form identification and differentiation, grasping of visual-spatial relations, and visual memory. In particular, visual attention span deficit (e.g. processing ability to locate word boundaries in Chinese) has been a recent focus in understanding CHINESE DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA in some individuals.
• Auditory Deficits: include the lack of capacity for categorical perception (e.g. ability to identify acoustic differences between forms to map the vast array of spoken sounds onto distinct phonetic categories) and auditory sensory processing (e.g. the physical disability of discerning and representing sounds).

4. Emerging neuroimaging evidence for mechanisms underpinning impairments related to  DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE

The advent of neuroscience technologies has definitely made it plausible for us to validate previous assertions drawn from inferences in psychological research. Some of such findings bring new insights into how we may design intervention methods for various groups of learners. This article also presents some of such findings that reinforce previous findings to show us routes to intervention.

The left middle frontal gyrus has been identified as a crucial region implicated in CHINESE DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA, with reduced activation (e.g. during various language tasks, including homophone judgment and character decision tasks) and grey matter volume observed in dyslexic individuals. This region seems to be responsible for the direct mapping of visual characters to corresponding monosyllabic sounds and morphemes, and its dysfunction leads to Chinese reading failure – though further investigation is required to validate these findings.

Other brain regions have also been implicated in Chinese DD, including the visual word form area, which shows decreased activation during Chinese character recognition. The right inferior occipital and middle temporal regions, on the other hand, exhibit increased activation, suggesting a language-specific compensatory strategy for visual-spatial analysis of Chinese characters.

5. Gene suspects for DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE

The article also surfaces some of the gene suspects that may have caused the brain abnormalities, although I must conceive there is little we can do with such information. The important learning point, though, is that gene studies have shown us that DYSLEXIA can be passed down the family line.

“In alphabetic languages, abundant family research over more than three decades has provided convincing evidence that dyslexia is a highly heritable disorder, with a heritability of 40–60%.”

Zhang et al., 2023: Recent Advances in Chinese Developmental Dyslexia

What does the research landscape on CHINESE DEVELOPMENTAL DYSLEXIA inform us about this? Do we expect many genes that are related to the condition? Studies in the last decade have surfaced 3 candidates: DRD2, DCDC2, and KIAA0319. However, results have been conflicting and it is still early to conclude that any of these candidates is a strong predicting gene.

Notably though, the article cited another research project which examines the impact of genes and environment on orthographic processing (Su et al., 2015). It found evidence which demonstrates how environmental factors (e.g. home literacy practices) can interact with genetic factors (e.g. genes related to reading) to influence brain activation patterns in early literacy development.

I thought this might be something of interest: could this become one of the keys to unlocking a new level of control over our genetic makeup, and we as language educators can address the learning needs of dyslexic individuals actively? That is something that requires further exploration of our academic counterparts.

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Conclusion: Aspirations from practitioners for research of DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE

I truly hope that the spotlighted article has offered you valuable insights, just as it did for me. Putting the issue of DYSLEXIA aside, it somewhat teases the intricacies of Reading in Chinese, which I deemed as extremely important. I’ve mentioned multiple times on other articles with LEA that reading is a skill that deserves our attention and investment, even if we’re only interested in oracy development. For that, we need to have clarity of reading (and its hurdles and developmental milestones) in our target language(s).

As a conclusion, I thought the article also shared some aspirations for future of DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE which should also excite some of us. Most studies on DYSLEXIA and DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE work with children (probably because that is the phase where any intervention works best). However, adults should also be worth our attention as they demonstrate the trajectories of living with the condition and how they thrived (or not) in the real world.

The very fact that DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE caught my attention is also its specific focus on one language. We do need more insights into language-universal and language-specific neurobiological mechanisms underlying DYSLEXIA to really then tailor intervention approaches in the target language(s) accordingly. I should emphasise that this is something which should cut across other areas (e.g. bilingualism, language acquisition) as the “common truth” that is derived from a narrow set of studies (e.g. focusing only on English) may not be as universal as we think it to be.

The article also made a call for more ways to improve public awareness about dyslexia and solicit social support for dyslexic children and their families. I would extend this to much of academic research. A wealth of wisdom is often locked away in academic journals, filled with technical terms that may be challenging for non-experts to comprehend, despite being the very people who need to be informed by that knowledge. I see this as my mission, thus LEA’s mission. This spotlight series is also one of my attempts to be more efficient on this journey.

Anyway, if you’ve been following LEA for some time, you might have read my articles from the Miniseries: Decoding Definitions. This “Spotlight Series” is something a bit more enduring, as it’s my attempt to work on short-form articles before transforming them into something more comprehensive on the same topic. Well, sometime down the road, when you return to this link, it may be housing an article that is a comprehensive discussion of DYSLEXIA IN CHINESE. Otherwise, we can continue to look forward to many “spotlights” ahead, to stay conversant of “recent updates” in many topics that language educators be interested in.

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