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  3. A boy who struggles to read English primary-school storybooks yet has no trouble with university physics textbooks in Japanese i

A boy who struggles to read English primary-school storybooks yet has no trouble with university physics textbooks in Japanese i

admin2013-10-31  85
问题     A boy who struggles to read English primary-school storybooks yet has no trouble with university physics textbooks in Japanese is challenging current thinking on dyslexia. The 17-year-old boy, known as AS, is the first person shown to be dyslexic in one language but not in another.
    " This could have profound consequences for concepts of reading," says Taeko Wydell of Brunei University in west London, who has studied AS. " If there is a specific brain area for reading and a person has impairment in this area, in theory all his languages should be affected. " The case is also posing problems for researchers who argue that dyslexia is visual procession disorder.
    AS has two English-speaking parents but lives in Japan. At the age of six, he began attending a Japanese primary school, but it soon became clear that he was lagging behind his Japanese counterparts in English. When AS was 13, tests confirmed that the problem was dyslexia, a congenital difficulty with reading.
    The causes of dyslexia are poorly understood, but have been linked to damage in part of the brain’ s left hemisphere known as the perisylvian area. The condition is marked by an impaired a-bility to process the written symbols of language, such as letters—which has led some researchers to suggest that the problem lies ultimately in faulty visual processing.
    Intrigued by AS’ s case, Wydell and her colleague Brain Butterworth of University College London looked at his reading in Japanese. Japanese has two written forms. One, called kanji, consists of symbols that carry meaning but have no phonetic value. The kana script contains symbols that correspond to particular sounds.
    Wydell first tested AS’ s ability to read 160 words written in kanji. Many kanji characters have two pronunciations—one in the Chinese from which the symbols were derived and the other unique to Japanese—but only one is correct in a given context. Knowing how to pronounce a word can be extremely difficult. Yet AS read kanji at undergraduate level and so has no problem with his visual processing skills. He has also passed competitive high school entrance exams, which require expertise in kana.
    In English, however, AS scored half as well as the average person of his age when asked to read real words and made-up words out loud. And he could read only one of 50 "difficult" words, such as "nausea" and "aisle". Nevertheless, AS perceives English sounds "just like a native", says Wydell.
    Wydell argues that AS’ s case is difficult to reconcile with conventional theories about dyslexia. "If AS has a problem with visual processing," She says, "it should show up even more in kanji. " She accepts that many children diagnosed as dyslexic may well have problems processing visual information , but suspects that others—like AS—suffer from a kind of dyslexia that occurs primary in English. The problem, she believes, like in the brain’ s ability to tackle the English language’ s complex system of mapping sounds to letters, which gives rise to some eccentric spellings. By contrast, kana letters always sound the same.
    Not all researchers in the field are persuaded, however. " If AS’ s sight vocabulary is so good in Japanese," asks Marjorie Perlman Lorch, a neurolinguist at Birkbeck College, " why hasn’ t he adopted the same strategy for irregular words in English?" She suspects that AS’ s reading problems could stem from his position as a cultural outsider in Japan. " Social identity and motivational factors can be crucial. "
Wydell finds it hard to explain AS’ s case in terms of______.
选项 A、faulty visual processing
B、English phonetics and spelling
C、congenital problems with reading
D、the disparities between English and Japanese
答案A
解析 第二段最后讲到这个案例给那些认为dyslexia is visual procession disorder的人带来了难题，可以推断这是因为用这个原理解释不通AS的案例。
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