
The Couple Who Helped Decode Dyslexia - laurex
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/health/dyslexia-shaywitz-yale.html
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stewbrew
"What are some of the specific factors that might ameliorate or exacerbate the
effects of dyslexia over a lifetime?"

I remember a study that compared dyslexia rates among mother tongues (or
countries?). The dyslexia rate was much lower for people who spoke languages
where you could predict the pronounciation from the spelling -- e.g. Spanish
and Italian. So maybe people should stop speaking languages where words are
pronounced in unpredictable ways -- e.g. English, which was among the
languages with the highest dyslexia rateś, Maybe US citizens with dyslexia
should simply move further south over the border to Ḿexico?

Unfortunately, I cannot remember the exact study. Could also be fake news.

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yorwba
> So maybe people should stop speaking languages where words are pronounced in
> unpredictable ways -- e.g. English

Surely it would be easier to switch to a phonetic script for English, rather
than learning a whole foreign language. Using pronunciation dictionaries, that
could even be automated easily.

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DonaldFisk
English has many different accents, so what's phonetic for one accent wouldn't
be for another. It would result in different spelling conventions in different
parts of the UK and the USA.

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stewbrew
The same is true for Spanish. But they had a much better basis to begin with.
The problem with English is that it's a mix of many influences (I'm not
talking about different accents but about entirely different languages) that
never got cleaned up.

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gnicholas
The best reading I’ve done recently about dyslexia is Language at the Speed of
Sight, by Mark Seidenberg [1]. He goes into great detail about the neurology
or reading and various reading challenges (acquired and lifelong).

1: [https://www.amazon.com/Language-Speed-Sight-
Can%C2%92t-About...](https://www.amazon.com/Language-Speed-Sight-
Can%C2%92t-About/dp/0465019323)

