Does dyslexia depend on language?

2001/03/16 Galarraga Aiestaran, Ana - Elhuyar Zientzia

• Anatomia/Fisiologia

It seems that in some languages reading and writing is easier than in others. French and English, for example, are irregular languages, that is, they have complicated rules for writing and pronouncing words. For example, in Britain they have 1,120 combinations of letters to represent 40 sounds (phonemes) of their language. In France they can use more than 190 combinations of letters to write the 35 phonemes that the French has.

Italian, however, is a regular language, since with 33 combinations of letters the 25 Italian phonemes are obtained, that is, each syllable has a sound and there is no other possibility to pronounce it. This facilitates writing and reading, so in Italy there are much less dyslexic than in Britain.

To clarify the mechanisms of dyslexia, neurologists at the University of Milan have conducted research. Dyslexic students from British and French universities have been contrasted with Italian university students with signs of dyslexia, as it is rare to find serious reading problems among Italian university students.

According to the study, they saw the same activation model in brain areas related to reading and writing. In fact, they had less activity than normal students have. Thanks to this study, in addition to knowing the neurobiological origin of dyslexia, it has been shown that the difference that manifests between different cultures is due to the characteristics of languages.