I’ve went into a small rabbit hole about Chinese dyslexia after reading your comment where you treated each letter like a drawing instead of a letter, and it turns out that English and Chinese dyslexia probably affect different parts of the brain, and that someone who is dyslexic in alphabet-based systems (English) may not be dyslexic in logograph-based systems (Chinese).
Wai Ting Siok of Hong Kong University has discovered that being dyslexic in Chinese is actually not the same as being dyslexia in English. Her team’s MRI studies showed that dyslexia among users of alphabetic scripts such as English versus users of logographic scripts such as Chinese was associated with different parts of the brain. Chinese reading uses more of a frontal part of the left hemisphere of the brain, whereas English reading uses a posterior part of the brain.
Converging behavioral evidence suggests that, while phonological and rapid automatized naming deficits are language universal, orthographic and morphological deficits are specific to the linguistic properties of Chinese. At the neural level, hypoactivation in the left superior temporal/inferior frontal regions in dyslexic children across Chinese and alphabetic languages may indicate a shared phonological processing deficit, whereas hyperactivation in the right inferior occipital/middle temporal regions and atypical activation in the left frontal areas in Chinese dyslexic children may indicate a language-specific compensatory strategy for impaired visual-spatial analysis and a morphological deficit in Chinese DD, respectively.
This made me wonder, since written Chinese has no connection with spoken Chinese, did people in ancient China mostly read aloud or read silently when reading by themselves? I’d expect that they didn’t read out what they say.
Also, when I read Chinese as a second-language speaker, having learned English before Chinese, I often find that subvocalizing the Chinese characters helps me to understand it, and not doing so makes it difficult for me to read, however my Chinese-native parents don’t have an inner voice when reading Chinese.
I think the general differences in language processing between different types of languages is interesting, though I’m not sure how useful this is. Just my ramblings.
Hi, I am from China and learned Chinese as my first language. First, I think people in ancient China mostly read aloud. In China, there is a famous proverb “讀書有三到，謂心到眼到口到”（Reading has three arrivals, that is, the heart, the eye, the mouth）written by Zhu Xi, who lived in Song dynasty. Besides, I have inner voice when reading or writing Chinese( except when I read very fast). Just for reference.
Oh wow, I love this! Thank you for looking in to this and sharing!
It lines up with my intuitions and experience trying to learn Japanese. I found all of it as baffling as any new language I tried to learn except kanji. I noticed I found learning kanji far easier than learning any words in hiragana or katakana (both phonetic instead of pictorial), and also that I found learning kanji easier than most non-dyslectic English speakers I ran in to (I didn’t run in to many Dutch speakers)
I’ve went into a small rabbit hole about Chinese dyslexia after reading your comment where you treated each letter like a drawing instead of a letter, and it turns out that English and Chinese dyslexia probably affect different parts of the brain, and that someone who is dyslexic in alphabet-based systems (English) may not be dyslexic in logograph-based systems (Chinese).
For example, from the University of Michigans’s dyslexia help website:
from a linguistics review in 2023:
This made me wonder, since written Chinese has no connection with spoken Chinese, did people in ancient China mostly read aloud or read silently when reading by themselves? I’d expect that they didn’t read out what they say.
Also, when I read Chinese as a second-language speaker, having learned English before Chinese, I often find that subvocalizing the Chinese characters helps me to understand it, and not doing so makes it difficult for me to read, however my Chinese-native parents don’t have an inner voice when reading Chinese.
I think the general differences in language processing between different types of languages is interesting, though I’m not sure how useful this is. Just my ramblings.
Hi, I am from China and learned Chinese as my first language. First, I think people in ancient China mostly read aloud. In China, there is a famous proverb “讀書有三到，謂心到眼到口到”（Reading has three arrivals, that is, the heart, the eye, the mouth）written by Zhu Xi, who lived in Song dynasty. Besides, I have inner voice when reading or writing Chinese( except when I read very fast). Just for reference.
Interesting! Thank you for sharing
Oh wow, I love this! Thank you for looking in to this and sharing!
It lines up with my intuitions and experience trying to learn Japanese. I found all of it as baffling as any new language I tried to learn except kanji. I noticed I found learning kanji far easier than learning any words in hiragana or katakana (both phonetic instead of pictorial), and also that I found learning kanji easier than most non-dyslectic English speakers I ran in to (I didn’t run in to many Dutch speakers)