The literate people are those who can read and write, while those illiterate ones are unfortunately labeled as ignorants. However, not many people realize that reading characters or alphabets are not biologically born to it. It is a technique we learn from rigorous training.
Research on reading difficulty, or dyslexia, can be traced back to nineteenth century. An English doctor reported several children who were extremely “stupid”–who could not be taught to read and write. However, the understanding of dyslexia is a modern science. It is not until 1970s and earlier 1980s that researchers fully understood the mechanism of reading. That is, one needs to learn how to link phonetic sound to visual written alphabets. A staging framework was proposed based on observations from children’s learning to read.
Basically, children first learn how to speak. Many sounds and associated meanings are processed and stored before they start to read. The broca’s area in dominant side (mostly left brain for right-hand people, not sure about left hand people, for example myself :-)) is actively involved in this stage. When time comes to learn to read, normal children will relate those characters or alphabets to the familiar sound–through sound to meanings and to text. For normal children, a word is visualized as a whole thing, and the related information such as pictures around the word help the mechanical process from sound to word, and word to meanings. It is not uncommon for parents to discover that a child who knows the word “that”, which has no visual meaning, in one picture book, but fails to recognize it in another book. Nevertheless, by mechanically associating the sound of “that” with the alphabets, children store a fairly large vocabulary before knowing how to pronounce the sound of each syllabus. That is why parents need to read aloud to their children, in particular read with them.
The breakthrough occurs when children realize that the alphabets have phonetic rules and intentionally apply these rules in reading. During this stage, the vocabulary expands exponentially. After grade 3, most normal children have developed to such a level that there is no explicit need to read aloud words to understand the meaning of the text. At the same time, the Wernicke’s area, the semantic processing area also develops progressively to facilitate the reading process. This new functional area in left brain and vast connections among brain areas which deal with sounds, text, meanings, and semantic process are established. A shortcut from text to meanings is created (presumably in werniche’s area). One should note that boys are more likely to activate only the left brain during the first stage of reading, while girls can activate both sides of brain, which is why there are fewer dyslexia children in females than in males.
However, for those dyslexia children, they have difficulty to associate the text with sound, in particular those words with no physical pictures such as “that” and “is” (as also the case for many normal children). Further, the semantic area is not well established in these children, although the understanding and thinking process (in other brain areas) are not impaired. It should be note that after carefully training, most of them will create somewhat compensation in the non-dominant brain. Therefore, many dyslexia children experience the slowness of reading, but are good at abstract thinking and visualization. Their intelligence is not impaired.
Nevertheless, the above theories, confirmed by numerous studies, are proposed and tested in people who speak phonetic languages such as English. An unsettled question arises: what about those who don’t speak phonetic languages, for example Chinese people?
A recent article in Nature examined this issue. Their functional magnet resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments concluded that there are culture differences in learning process and in activated brain areas. It is not surprising considering the great plasticity of brain. Although Chinese language has been developed into a morphosyllabic system, the segments of a Chinese character have no inherent meanings related to the whole character (for most Chinese characters). The reading process may require three different activities from sound to the meaning of words: phonology, orthography and semantic meanings, while the orthography is less important in English.
In that study, the reaction time for two homophonic characters was impaired in dyslexia Chinese children, thus confirming the phoneme theory that the link between sound and text is impaired among them. That there is no difference of accuracy of meaning between normal and dyslexia children further supports the theory that the understanding and thinking process is not impaired. In addition, brain imaging revealed that several brain areas involved in Chinese reading, and dyslexia Chinese children have several areas impaired, in particular the left middle front gyrus, the visual word form area that serves orthographic-to-semantic integration. Nevertheless, this research is a significant addition in understanding reading process and dyslexia.
What are the implications to common Chinese people who are struggling in English? Not much. If one can read and write Chinese without difficulty, one can read and write English with ease too. In fact, brain areas and activities for learning Chinese may be supersede the functional areas associated with learning English. All connections are well established in normal Chinese readers. It is possible that Chinese people may have more advantages in learning English than those English speaking people learn Chinese. In fact, most Chinese students in the US have no difficult listening, reading, and comprehending English within months after their arrivals.
Then why do many people feel so dismayed in learning English? Based on my experience, the difficulties lie in the semantic part during speaking and writing process. The large English vocabulary and mechanical composition of them should not be difficult for most normal people, as it is evident that many Chinese students can overcome the vocabulary hurdle in merely several months, although the subtlties of words are still difficult to master. However, English, and many other phonetic languages, have a very complicate grammatic system. Speaking and writing in English require one to pay attention to details such as plurals, small words, and grammartic consistency. The subtle differences in meanings among words are beyond the phonetic realm. Chinese adults literally reconstuct a whole new system to use English. There is a great confusion in brain areas that deal with semantic meanings. In addition, the fine details of wording and grammars take a life long time to overcome. Even for a proficient English native speaker, grammatic errors are unavoidable. Because adults’ brain areas are fixed to some extent, it takes a longer time to master these fine parts for Chinese. On the other hand, the grammar is not a big issue in Chinese language. Very few native Chinese speakers struggle with Chinese grammar.
Even though the outgoing brain part such as Broca’s area is normal, and indeed there is a lot of information inside the brain, because the confusion is inside the semantic part of brain, one typical problem in Chinese English is that all the words in a sentence are correct, and most are accurate, but the grammar is incorrect. This puzzles the native speakers because their brain can’t process the disconnected words without grammar. Many Chinese students find it frustrating and inhibiting after hopeless attempting to arrange the same words in different erroneous ways.
A few final words. I found the book “overcome dyslexia”, written by Sally Shaywitz is very interesting. Although my son is actually way ahead of his peers in reading, I still found the theories scientifically presented in this book are very informative and enlightening. In addition, the book prescribes a detailed process and associated materials to help normal children start to learn and be a proficient reader. I highly recommend this book to all serious parents. It clarifies many puzzling questions during Child’s learning process.