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Published online 7 April 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.739
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Dyslexic diversity
Chinese and English dyslexias stem from different brain abnormalities.
Children with dyslexia have trouble learning to read, but the cause of their difficulties depends on what language they are attempting to learn, according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
In 2004, Li Hai Tan at the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues examined patterns of activity in the brain as English and Chinese speakers — some dyslexic, some not — worked on various reading-related tests while inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine.
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I wonder how might be the picture of the brain of a french kid in front of a Chinese or French book ? Perhaps an interesting experiment for an easier approach of what part of the brain is actually working and why ! I should be not very astonished if the different parts working in the dyslexic and "normal" brains would be concerned with modified purine (some are managing free radicals) who works with A1 receptors metabolism... and P2D ones!
Perhaps the actual paper makes clear that different dyslexias have been studied for decades. See for example, 'Acquired dyslexias in Japanese, clinical features and underlying mechanisms' by Sumiko Sasanuma in 'Deep Dyslexia', 1980, edited by Max Coltheart, Karalyn Patterson and John C. Marshall. It had been noticed that acquired dyslexias of kana (phonetic) and kanji (ideographic) could occur independently from strokes on opposite sides of the brain.