cm0002Do Dyslexia Fonts Actually Work?
bleistift2tl;dr: No.
TrinsecAn interesting concept I haven’t thought about. I can’t imagine what it’s like to not have an auditory representation of the words I’m reading. Maybe the idea of the article is salvageable if you consider “matching characters” to the elements of language, like matching the letters u and n to the idea of “negation”. Though I don’t know how that would hold up when words aren’t made up of individual, meaningful constituents.
What language do those deaf dyslexics read? Could they speak it before going deaf? Is it their first language or a second language after a sign language?
I can’t think of a comparable situation elsewhere in the world for hearing people. The closest that comes to mind is learning Classical Chinese in ancient Korea or Japan or ancient and medieval Vietnam, but nowadays all those countries have good phonetic writing systems and still don’t expect everyone to learn Classical Chinese.
Sign language first. Written language (Dutch) second. The ones I happen to know cannot speak Dutch at all. They’re pure sign language users. They’re all born deaf.
That’s interesting. Since they were born deaf and can’t speak Dutch, do they act like they’re memorizing words as if they were hieroglyphs?
Not sure. I know one of them fairly well, and he has the tendency to swap letters around. So can we go watch a fun movie on a VDV, and he could also copy a DC for me… Those particular words being finger spelled.
I think a specialist would be interested. I don’t know enough about dyslexia to make a sound guess as to whether this is more like hearing-people dyslexia or character amnesia.
Character amnesia (forgetting how to write Chinese characters, often ones you can recognize without trouble) for me shows up as forgetting components or slightly misremembering them, as if I couldn’t quite remember whether it was “CD” or “CP” or “CO”, or if it was a “DVD” or a “DVV”.
There was a study of Chinese kids learning English, and only 1/4 or 1/3 of kids who were dyslexic in one language were dyslexic in the other one too. I don’t have the link to hand but can probably dig it out if someone is interested.
There’s also the famous case study of Alex, who was dyslexic in English but an excellent reader in Japanese.
So my uneducated understanding is that “dyslexia” has to be a cover term for multiple issues. Difficulty matching characters to sounds might make for a below-average reader in Chinese, and difficulty recognizing characters might make for a below-average reader in English, but reverse the languages and both kids would be dyslexic.
P.S. The most recent trendy thing I know about is the “crowding” explanation for dyslexia, which hypothesizes that dyslexia really is a vision problem, but the problem isn’t mirroring but rather difficulty separating characters at normal spacing. This only appears to hold true for a subset of dyslexics, and that particular study totally failed to distinguish between the effects of increased spacing between characters, increased spacing between words, and increased spacing between lines. This study of Italian dyslexics found that increasing spacing between characters without also increasing spacing between words is worse than nothing, a condition that wasn’t tested in the study above.
I’d like to see a test of increased line spacing only. I remember that increasing line spacing was (and is) helpful when reading a script that I read slowly and poorly because when reading what were very long lines for me but normal for natives I’d lose track and my eyes would wander onto adjacent lines.
