UNIVERSITY „DŽEMAL BIJEDIĆ MOSTAR“
FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
DEPARTMENT: ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
SUBJECT : Opća lingvistika
NEUROLINGUISTICS:
Developmental dyslexia and dynamics of language
learning
Student: Lejla Baralija
Index number: HB210020
Professor: Prof. dr. Edina Špago-Ćumurija
Mostar, December 2022
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Neurolinguistics
1.2 Understanding developmental dyslexia
1
2
3
2.0 Manifestation of developmental dyslexia
2.1 Reading difficulties
2.2 Phonological and spelling deficits
4
5
6
3.0 Developmental dyslexia and language learning
3.1 Foreign language challenges
3.2 Methods for learning foreign languages
7
8
9
4. Conclusion
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Sources and references
1.0 Introduction
In this paper I will keep a record of my own observations on the given topic, based on various
sources stated at the end. This task was challenging , but as a student of English language I found
it very useful and interesting.
Communication and written language is one of the greatest products of the evolution. However,
many individuals have problems acquiring these skills, with a rise in disorders such as dyslexia
or more general reading and writing difficulties pose a major problem in a society that continues
to rely on written communication more and more.
I will discuss implications and challenges of language learning among people suffering from
developmental dyslexia.
1
1.1 Neurolinguistics
According to Elizabeth Ahlsen, Professor of neurolinguistics, University of Gothenburg,
neurolinguistics is a field of study whose main target is the relation of language and
communication and how the brain comprehends and produces the language.
It combines neurological and neurophysiological theory with linguistic theory, as well as
attaining a very close relationship to psycholinguistics.
“Neurolinguistics” became the established term for the field in the 1960s, influenced by the
development of psycholinguistics. Field of study of the relationship between the brain and
language date back to Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, with the first reference to the brain as
the center of language found in the papyrus from about 3500BC.1
From the Middle Ages to 1800s, number of descriptions of language disorders appeared,
inspiring further development of neurolinguistics. It is said to have been established in 1861,
when French physician and anatomist, Pierre Paul Broca presented his theories of the human
brain and language based on his patients syptoms and the dissection of his brain. The patient had
suffered brain damage which caused his speech disorder and affected the third frontal
convolution in the left hemisphere of the brain. Thus, Broca proposed two important hypotheses
in 1865;
1. That it was possible to localize phychological functions in brain convolutions
2. That linguistic impediments were caused by deficits and lesions in the left hemisphere.
Based on these theories, researchers worked to localize and understand symptoms such as “word
deafness” and “word blindness”, which will later gain a new name-dyslexia.
Understanding the relationship between the speech and writing and the disturbance of these
abilities is an important task for neurolinguistics.Since the 1990s, there has been an enormous
shift in the field of neurolinguistics. With modern technology, researchers can study how the
brains of normal speakers process language, and how a damaged brain processes and
compensates for injury. This new technology allows us to track the brain activity that is going
on while people are reading, listening, and speaking, and also to get very fine spatial resolution
of the location of damaged areas of the brain.
1
Introduction to Neurolinguistics, Elizabeth Ahlsen (2006)
2
1.2. Understanding developmental dyslexia
Developmental Dyslexia is a learning based disability that interferes in particular with the
acquisition of language. This disorder, which has a clear neurologic and genetic origin, affects
around 5–15% of the population and it is highly inheritable. 2
It is namely widely acknowledged that dyslexia runs in families: it is estimated that a child with
a dyslexic parent or sibling has 50% probability of being dyslexic.
Dyslexia, also known until the 1960s as word blindness, dates from late 19th century: coined in
German from dys- ‘difficult’ + Greek lexis ‘speech’. Use of the term primarily distinguishes
between genetic and acquired forms of dyslexia. Acquired forms typically result from stroke or
head trauma for example, they present very differently and can diminish over time,
whereas developmental dyslexia is a life long condition.
Developmental dyslexia is defined as the failure to acquire age-appropriate reading skills despite
adequate intelligence and education. One of the most easily detectable symptoms of dyslexia is
the failure to acquire properly reading and spelling skills. This impairment appears to be
particularly surprising in those children, as dyslexics, who are otherwise intelligent and
adequately exposed to literacy.3
Psychological and epidemiological investigations have lent it respectability and there are strong
indications that genetic influences are at work.It is thought to affect between 4 and 7% of
children, usually equivalent to a retardation of some 18–24 months in reading relative to
expectation.
Developmental dyslexia is of neurobiological origin, with the problem being located physically
in the brain. Most of the areas responsible for speech, language processing, and reading are
situated in the left hemisphere. Research found that people with dyslexia have less gray matter in
the left parietotemporal area than nondyslexic individuals. Having less gray matter in this region
of the brain could lead to problems processing the sound structure of language.4
In discussions of developmental dyslexia, subjects have been divided into auditory and visual
dyslexia groups, with the majority showing auditory-phonological problems. However,
according to the work of Peter Bryant and Lynette Bradley, these groups should be treated as
one, with internal auditory variations and visual problems to some extent.
2
Gayan and Olson 1999
Disentangling Dyslexia, Maria Vender
4
Booth and Burman (2001)
3
3
2. Manifestations of developmental dyslexia
Developmental Dyslexia is a complex and multifaceted disorder. The most evident and
prominent symptoms include reading and spelling difficulties, with their core in problems with
phonological processing. The phoneme is the smallest identifiable unit of spoken or heard
language, individual phonemes being assembled together in the construction of words. An
important task in learning to read appears to consist in appreciating the correspondence between
such phonemes and their equivalent representations or graphemes in written language.
This is often known as “phonemic awareness”, which can conveniently be assessed by getting
children to read pseudo-wordsthat can easily be read using letter/sound correspondence rules, but
mean nothing.5
Failure to learn to read always results from not being able to learn how to split words down into
their separate sounds in order to match them with the letters that symbolize them, which is the
essence of the reading skill.
For it has become clear that the basic problem that dyslexics face is that they fail to learn to
properly sequence the letters in a word and/or the sounds of which it is composed. This is
manifested in slower and less accurate letter-sound recognition, which then results in difficulty
with visual system and remembering the order of letters.
To visually sequence the letters in a word accurately one needs to to focus attention on the first
letter in order to identify it, then shift attention to the next letter while retaining in memory the
position of the first, then shift to the next retaining the position of the first and second letters, and
so on. Many dyslexics face the difficulty in hearing the sounds of a word in the correct order.
This leads to the deficit of attention and sensory timing.
Dyslexic people often have good skills in creative thinking and problem solving, but struggle
with planning and organisation. If left untreated, it may lead social problems, such as low selfesteem, behaviour problems, anxiety and ADHD, aggression and shyness due to trouble keeping
up with peers. It can lead to the inability to reach the true potential of an individual, which leads
to negative long-term issues on educational and economic basis.
What is Developmental Dyslexia? – John Stein
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4
2.1 Reading difficulties
As evidenced by a great number ofstudies, dyslexic children exhibit a very slow, inaccurate and
effortful reading. Reading errors typically concern a poor capacity to discriminate:
(1) similar graphemes which are differently oriented (e.g. “b” and “d”)
(2) similar graphemes which differ only for small details (e.g. “m” and “n”)
(3) graphemes that correspond to similar phonemes (e.g. “b” and “p”; “v” and “f ”).6
Dyslexics tend to substitute similar-looking or even urelated words for the right ones. For
example, reading the word "now" as "won" or "left" as "felt."Words may also blend together and
spaces are lost.The experience is often described as the letters “jumping” around or even being
distorted, as if they are cut in half.
Reading errors are more frequent in those languages that have an opaque orthographic system,
like English, Danish or French, where there are multiple ways to spell every phoneme, and most
letters also have multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context.
Reading problems manifest themselves differetly in bilingual dyslexics. For example, the issue
of phonological awareness may not be a problem for those who speak a transparent language
such as Spanish while it is one of the most common problems in less transparent languages such
as English.Transparent languages are those that have a direct correlation between the grapheme
and the phoneme i.e. there are very few digraphs and diphthongs. Dyslexics speaking these
languages may, however, still have word retrieval difficulties, motor-skills problems or
difficulties with their short-term memory.
A number of studies tested word and nonword reading in dyslexic children across different
languages: significantly, results demonstrated that the accuracy rate was only 40% for English
children, while the accuracy for those speaking langugaes with a more consistent ortography
such as German, Spanish and Italian was up to 93%.7Moreover, it has been found that the most
sensitive variable when comparing reading performance across languages is not reading
accuracy, but rather reading speed, especially in those languages with a transparent orthography.
The main deficit across languages appears to be poor reading fluency, characterized by a slow
decoding process, where dyslexics generally manifest great difficulties when asked to read
nonwords or unfamiliar words. Their reading errors reveal that they do not obey the rules of
ortography-phonology conversion and tend to replace similar-looking but unrealted words.
6
Disentangling Dyslexia, Maria Vender
Wimmer and Goswami (1994)
7
5
2.2. Phonological and spelling deficits
The most distinctive phonological feature exhibited by dyslexics is the very poor phonological
awareness, which is a metalinguistic skill concerning the individual's conscious knowledge of the
precise sequence of sounds making up words. It is a necessary skill to accomplish reading and
decoding words, demanding the knowledge of the link between graphemes and phonemes.
A more recent study conducted by Ramus and colleagues (2013) confirms that phonological
deficits are very widespread in dyslexia and particularly evident in tasks assessing phonological
awareness, such as spoonerisms and rhymes detection. . Results showed that dyslexics perceived
phonetic boundaries less sharply than normal readers and that they were worse than controls in
the verbal repetition of both high and low frequency words and, especially nonwords.
Vocabulary deficits and word-finding problems are often reported in the literature on dyslexia
and they are frequently referred to as early predictors of later reading achievements. In particular,
dyslexic children’s vocabulary has been found underdeveloped in comparison to that of
agematched typically developing children. Moreover, poor readers displayed a significant wordlength effect (i.e. the longer the word, the poorer the performance).8
The inability to acquire properly spelling skills is the other major symptom generally associated
with developmental dyslexia.In comparison to reading, spelling is further complicated by the fact
that there is often more than one possibility to write a word in a phonologically acceptable way,
especially in English (e.g. flour-flower).
Spelling is affected by a variety of skills, the ability to recognize the letters and match them with
their correct ortography while still preserving the meaning of the words. Moreover, it demands
attention, motor skills and visual memory. Given that dyslexics exhibit poor phonological
decoding and poor phonological awareness, poor spelling is also expected, indicating that
spelling is inextricably linked to reading development.9
Typical misspellings often include the omission of the second consonant in a complex cluster
(“tip” instead of “trip”), the omission of double consonants (“swimming” – swimming), the
confusion of graphemes corresponding to similar phonemes (“trik”- trick) and irregular spellings
(“pakt”-packed).
Dyslexics appear to rely more on the recovering of the visual form of the words from a
phonological input lexicon, corresponding to the orthographic input lexicon, which is linked to
their own mental storage of familiar ortographic and phonologic words.
8
Wolf and Obregon (1992)
Ehri (1991, 1997).
9
6
3.0 Developmental dyslexia and language learning
Dyslexic students who study languages may have difficulties hearing sounds, connecting those
sounds to letters, sounding out words and memorizing new vocabulary. They may also struggle
more in reading and writing activities.That's because new phonemes that don’t exist in your
native tongue will be both harder to hear and to produce. Babies are born with the ability to hear
any sound, but by the time they are 1 year-old, their brains have been tuned to the language
around them.
When learning a foreign language, you need time to become familiar with the most frequent
sounds and sound combinations, so you can parse the speech.
For example, it is sometimes said that Danish speakers “swallow" their consonants, making it
tricky for learners to hear exactly which sounds have been uttered. Looking at a word on paper,
you will not necessarily know how to pronounce it.There is also something to be said for a
language being consistent in its approach to spelling. The reason why spelling bees are not a
thing in Germany or Spain is due to the predictability of the words, which is not the case for
English.
Languages like Mandarin and Arabic use different part of the brain responsible for processing
the language, as they are character-based instead of alphabetic language. Interestingly enough,
there have even been studies that show dyslexic students have fewer difficulties learning to read
and write in character based tongues.10
It is of course problematic to know exactly why a particular subject may be more demanding on
one dyslexic student than another since every dyslexic has varied strengths and weaknesses but it
can generally be said that dyslexics have problems with learning a foreign language because of
two main reasons;
1) the nature of the disability
2) the manner in which foreign languages are commonly taught in schools
Foreign language curricula is one of the main reasons why dyslexic students find foreign
language learning challenging, as they are based on an expected, almost natural ability to
comprehend and learn new languages, which is difficult for students with this condition.
Dyslexic students who are successful learning a foreign language often experience huge gains
in self-confidence, which can extend to other areas of the classroom. Languages also present a
great opportunity for them to strengthen cognitive skills, including working memory.
10
Dyslexia and Language learning, https://www.readandspell.com/dyslexia-and-foreign-language-learning
7
3.1 Foreign language challenges
To be able to successfully learn a foreign language, one must first comprehend how one's own
native language functions. As was mentioned earlier, dyslexic students frequently have difficulty
learning a foreign language because they do not comprehend their own language.
Even reading, which the student may have mastered in their native language, again becomes a
challenge as they must decipher which letters are to be pronounced and which are silent.When
learning German, students may find the multiple consonant combinations a struggle as well as
the long polysyllabic words commonly found in the language. For dyslexic students studying
German, who have understood the main syntax of their native language, will find it extra
difficult to learn that the verb must now be placed at the end of a sentence.11
These differences in languages can of course be a challenge for anyone trying to master a new
language but for the dyslexic student who has a lessened ability to process language foreign
language can be even greater endeavor. They suddenly find that the rules and strategies they
were taught in their native language are of little or no use in the new language. When dyslexics
have trouble retrieving words from their long-term memory, for instance, they often learn to
circumlocute, or use other words to explain an unfamiliar word. Due to the foreign language's
inadequate oral skills, this method cannot be utilized in foreign language education.
Dyslexics must, therefore, be taught new strategies that work for that particularlanguage in order
to succeed.
It has been found that most foreign language teachers receive very little education within the
field of special needs. They are, in other words, not equipped to help their dyslexic students since
the methods they commonly use will often hinder the dyslexic child more than help them
succeed within foreign language learning. 12
Some researchers advise strengthening a dyslexic student’s phonological understanding of his or
her mother tongue before taking on study of a foreign language.
11
Ott (1997), page. 187-190
Schneider (2009)
12
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3.2 Methods for learning foreign languages
In regards to students with learning disabilities,the special aid in primary educationshould be
provided in the manner and extent required to enable the student to meet the minimum
proficiency requirements.
This means that it is the school's responsibility to provide special support continuously as long as
the student is unable to meet the requirements without the help of special aid.The question of
which approach to use and how to use it is a contentious one because one strategy may be the
most effective for one dyslexic student but of little use to another.
There are various programs and strategies intended for helping dyslexic students become more
proficient in their native language, such as Orton-Gillingham Approach, Alphabetic Phonics,
Slingerland Approach, The Wilson Program, Hickey Program and Shelton Program.13
Apart from these programs, there are various strategies and courses to assist dyslexic students in
learning foreign languages. Experts first suggest starting with speaking and listening to help one
gain fluency in a language. Which foreign language one chooses can make a big difference in
how well they do. It’s important to follow their interests. Reccomended language is often
Spanish, as it more predictable than many languages and it has fewer rules and exceptions.
Richard L. Sparks and Karen S. Miller discussed the method of Multi-sensory teaching, which is
based on the idea that dyslexic students have a greater chance of accessing the curriculum when
they are taught using all senses simultaneously. This allows for the student to process the
information using his/her strongest senses and at the same time strengthening his/her
weaknesses.
Specific strategies include: breaking words into distinct graphemes that the students will first
see, then write and say simultaneously, feeling where the tongue is placed in the mouth in order
to pronounce a particular phoneme, break words into syllables by tapping their pencil for each,
color coding each vowel in order to see the distinction, color coding conjugation changes and
using flashcards y explaining similarities and differences between native and foreign
languages.14Although the this approach has been found beneficial for many dyslexic students it is
important to point out that students may need added support in not just aspects of the class work
pertaining to the specific foreign language demands.
The teachers and educatorsshould create their own strategies based on their dyslexic students
needs, talk to the school’s special education teacher or should be been given examples of
strategies at different courses.
13
Selected Papers of Sylvia O. Richardson, M.D
Sparks and Miller (2000)
14
9
It is only beginning to be hypothesized why dyslexic students' teachers do not employ more
didactic approaches. However, it can be argued that teachers are not using didactic strategies as
much because the teachers reported difficulties when working with dyslexic students ,not having
enough time to prioritize dyslexic students and they don't know enough about dyslexia to use
didactic strategies.
Method that a dyslexic person can apply themselves include surrounding themselves with a
foreign language, the higher the exposure to a language, higher the navigation throughout it.
Problems with reading and spelling are often a result of not being able to match sounds to letters
accurately. A great way to develop this skill is to watch a foreign film with subtitles in the
film’s original language. In this way, a person is reinforcing the sound-letter mapping through
listening and reading the foreign language.
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4.0 Conclusion
Most of us find it difficult to learn a new language because it requires us to reevaluate how we
understand our own language in order to correctly incorporate grammatical rules and syntactical
structures. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that the majority of dyslexic students
frequently struggle with foreign learning because they have consistently struggled with reading
and writing in their native language.
With dyslexia being such a common condition and having various types, the awareness should
be raised not only in schools but also at home. Furthermore, recognizing and localizing the issue
can help in treatment and alleviation.
When learning a foreign language, dyslexic people should have a proper education that alters
their needs and deficits, which can propose a higher chance of overcoming this condition and
contribute to the better quality of life and education for people suffering from dyslexia.
11
Sources and references
1. https://www.readandspell.com/dyslexia-and-foreign-language-learning (visited on Dec. 1st
2022)
2. Disentangling Dyslexia Phonological and Processing Deficit in Developmental Dyslexia
(2017) by Maria Vender
3. Developmental dyslexia by W.A Lishman https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/74/12/1603 (visited on
Dec. 1st 2022)
4. Dyslexia in First and Foreign Language Learning: A Cross- Linguistic Approach by Monika
Lodej
https://books.google.ba/books?id=dH6DAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=developmental+dyslexia+and+language+learning&hl
=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjFy4qq96b8AhWM9bsIHQCOCNcQ6AF6BAgIEAI#v=onepage&q
&f=false
5. Developmental Dyslexia, Phonological Skills and Basic Auditory Processing in Chinese,
dissertation by Hsiao-Lan Sharon Wang
6. Dyslexia and developmental language disorder: same or different? By Maggie Snowling
https://www.acamh.org/blog/dyslexia-developmental-language-disorder-different/ (Visited on
Nov. 20th 2022)
7. Introduction to Neurolinguistics, Elizabeth Ahlsen (2006)
12