Universal dyslexia?

Abstract

Estimates of the prevalence of dyslexia in different countries seem to reflect differences in orthographic complexity; dyslexia is more common in countries where the orthography (spelling) is complex (e.g. USA and Britain), compared with those where orthography is transparent (e.g. Italy). A recent study by Paulesu et al. has shown that, although the manifestation of dyslexia might differ depending on the precise orthography used, the core cognitive deficit and brain basis is universal 1 Paulesu E. et al. Dyslexia: cultural diversity and biological unity. Science. 2001; 291: 2165-2167 Crossref PubMed Scopus (824) Google Scholar . The study compared dyslexic and normal readers from countries with transparent (Italian) and complex (English and French) orthographies. Behaviourally, the dyslexics from each of the three countries showed a similar pattern of results, all performing poorly on subtests that required phonological short-term memory. Italian dyslexics did perform better than either the English or French dyslexics on reading tasks, but comparisons between dyslexic and normal readers from the same country revealed similarly marked differences irrespective of language.