The Importance of What is Being Read: Language Effects in Dyslexia

Jeesun Kim

The vast majority of work on the processing characteristics of poor readers has been conducted with readers of English. Although the English writing system is alphabetic, the correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is complex. This complexity has largely resulted from the intermixing of fragments of phoneme to grapheme correspondences from word's borrowed from other languages of political influence. Given the distinctive nature of the English writing system, it is unclear whether a characterization of reading disorders based on the study of English readers will be a universal one. The current talk reports on work that suggests that the properties of the writing system may affect the manner in which reading problems manifest. Groups of good and poor readers of four languages (English, Korean, Spanish & Thai) were tested using a range of visual and auditory processing tasks. The languages were specifically selected because they differ in the regularity of print to sound mapping as well as the visual complexity of their scripts. This talk will largely concentrate on the differences between the Korean and English results as they demonstrate what may be a novel effect of script. In terms of auditory processing, the results for the Korean readers were generally consistent with previous studies in English. It was found that compared to good readers, poor readers made more mistakes on a same-different tone-matching task at short stimulus intervals. Likewise, some of the poor readers needed longer time between stimuli to perceive auditory groupings. Further, good readers had higher scores on two phonological awareness tasks. However, unlike many studies in English, the current study failed to find evidence of differences between good and poor readers in sensitivity to dynamic visual stimuli. It is suggested that poor Korean readers do not demonstrate visual processing problems since the properties of the Hangul script, the way letters are grouped into syllables and the constraints of letter order within syllables, may reduce the likelihood of any visual processing difficulties emerging as a reading problem.

About Jeesun Kim

Jeesun Kim is currently a Research Fellow in the department of Psychology at the University of Melbourne. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 1998 at the University of New South Wales, Australia and took up a Post Doctoral Research Fellowship at Yeungnam University, Korea in 1998/99. In 1998/99 she has taught Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science at Korea and Sungkyunkwan Universities. In 2000 & 2001 she was a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistik (Nijmegen, The Netherlands). Her research interests are in the area of language processing and include language development, speech processing, multimodal processing and bilingualism.