"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
In fact you'd have to reconsider whether the unique spelling doesn't actually help reading. Between beat and beet it's surely easier to differentiate; Between read and had read not so much, granted, but:
With phonetic spelling, considering all the different dialects, you'd get written dialects and from that, potentially divergent spelling for pronunciations that are actually equal, just to fit one system or another. I've seen some proposals, one involving a new charset - I didn't like any of these, especially as the hints at the history of the word have some value, too, not to a first grader, but it surely helps. You can't erase that history, and piling onto it wouldn't make it any easier.
The result is that american language as a whole tends to simplify and ... substitute complicated words for ... with ... scrap that ... tends to replace long words with shorter ones. That's a general tendency in language I suppose.
We got into this mess because everyone wrote as they saw fit (slightly exegarating here). In that light loosening the rules again would seem counterproductive.
Be careful with the argument. The dyslexia might have more factors in play. The American school system isn't actually famous for its success, but I'm in no position to blame it.
The trend is going away from reading to video and voice, so I'm not sure how long the issue will remain.
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).
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.