Re: CHAT: dyslexia

On Wed, 28 Mar 2001 20:46:03 -0500 Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
writes:
> *Somewhere* I read (and my friend did, too) that people actually
> read
> logographic systems like Chinese somewhat faster because the
> translation
> goes directly from shapes to word-in-head, rather than shapes to
> sounds
> to word-in-head.  It might have been the yingzi article on
> Rosenfelder's
> Zompist.com but I'm not finding the reference and I won't swear to
> it.
-

I read the same thing in a book which i don't have with me at the moment,
it's somewheres in storage.  It was all about writing systems, and
introduced me to the terms _grapheme_ and _allograph_, among other
things.  It said that alphabets are faster to learn, but logographs are
faster to read.

> We don't know if these are absolutely true, but the question
> occurred to
> my friend: so would a logographic system alleviate some or many of
> the
> problems of dyslexic readers?
> Just wondering,
> YHL
-

The unique complexities of the different characters are what make them
faster to read, so i assume it might work the same way to help dyslexia,
especially since it'd be a lot rarer to have common groups of letters
like "dbp" which can easily be mistaken for eachother.  Or, it might make
it harder to read *because* of the complexity.  I don't know.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "i have too many characters running around in my head today..."