Dyslexia in Chinese: Clues from cognitive neuropsychology

In this review, we describe a series of cognitive neuropsychological studies of Chinese speaking aphasic patients that reveal subtypes of acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia in Chinese. These subtypes can be understood with reference to a cognitive framework that assumes reading and writing to dictation in Chinese depends on the division of labor between two pathways: a lexical-semantic pathway and a direct or nonsemantic pathway. This framework generates a number of predictions about the types of literacy problems that might be observed in native Chinese speakers who are learning to read and write. We argue that the language environment, and specifically the type of script used to read and write, will play a role in determining the phenotype of dyslexia in Chinese. We conclude that dyslexia in Chinese can be caused by psycholinguistic impairments at multiple levels including orthographic, semantic (morphological), and phonological processing.