Acquired Dyslexia and Dysgraphia across Scripts

Abstract

Many studies have investigated the cognitive processes used to read and to spell in English. Much of our kowledge about these processes comes from reports of patients with acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia, first identified in the behavioral neurology clinic. As in all clinical studies, the detail in these reports includes description of preserved and impaired abilities of the patient, usually with reference to a cognitive neuropsychological model of reading and spelling [6,12,13,26, 28,29]. The beauty of these reports is the insight provided to the clinician and to theorist about the topography of cognitive processing, allowing science to ‘carve nature at its joints’. One criticism of this research is the emphasis on European languages. However, a review of acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia in languages other than English reveals an interesting fact. Many cases are reported in Behavioral Neurology – a revelation that reflects the global reach and sophistication of this readership. It is therefore a great privilege to present this Special Issue on the topic of Reading and Writing Disorders Across Scripts. The question posed to the authors (and readers) of the papers in this Special Issue is whether the processes identified for reading and spelling in cognitive neuropsychological models developed for English, extend to other languages. This is not a trivial question that is limited to the armchair. Language processing in bilingual speakers is moving towards the front of cognitive neuropsychological enquiry simply because bilingual speakers are the majority of speakers in many language environments. Thus, it is of interest to know about dyslexia and dysgraphia in Chinese, Korean and Urdu for theoretical reasons but also because it is necessary to know if the cognitive processes used to read and to spell in one language have any effects on reading and spelling in another language [see 8, 9, 16 for interesting answers]. If the cognitive mechanisms used to read and to spell in one language impact on reading and spelling in another language then several clinical implications follow, specifically for the treatment of acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia in bilingual speakers [23,26, 40]. The contributors to this Special Issue report on patterns of acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Slovak and Spanish. One unique feature is reports of multilingual speakers with reading and spelling disorders in different languages (Druks et al.; Friedmann and Haddad; Kambanaros et al.; Senaha and Parente). These cases not only highlight the striking similarities in the patterns of dyslexia and dysgraphia across languages, they converge on the view that cognitive processes used to read and to spell are independent of linguistic differences. Such reports have implications for theoretical models of bilingual language processing because they suggest language ‘non-selective’ access to the reading system. For example, the Bilingual Interac-