The mechanism of deveopmental dyslexia: From behavior to genetics

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a specific learning disability. Exploring the mechanism of DD is of great assistance in developing the technique for diagnosis and therapy. There is a battery of researches about DD in west countries using alphabetic language as their mother tongue, though some opinions have not been widely accepted. The studies about Chinese DD are limited because it started relatively later. The authors review the advances of DD researches at three levels of behavior, neuron and genetics, surrounding three leading theories of DD: the phonological theory, the magnocellular (visual and auditory) theory and the cerebellar theory. At the same time, the authors compare the findings of DD between alphabetic languages and Chinese in order to uncover the differences of DD due to their mother tongue. Finally, the authors point out that Chinese dyslexics have their special characters different from those in alphabetic language, it's greatly necessary to strengthen the researches of Chinese DD, not only for establishing the theory of Chinese DD, but also for providing Chinese evidence of language specialization.