Developmental Dyslexia in Chinese

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by unexpectedly low reading ability in people who have adequate nonverbal intelligence, have acquired typical schooling, and have experienced sufficient sociocultural opportunities (Gabrieli, 2009; Peterson & Pennington, 2012). It is a recognized disorder in many literate societies and has been studied in a large variety of languages (Caravolas, 2005). The Chinese writing system presents sharp contrast to the alphabetic writing system in terms of how the graphic unit maps onto phonology and semantics. Thus, the investigations into the mechanisms for Chinese reading disability are important to the understanding of the universal and language-specific mechanisms of developmental dyslexia. The behavioral and neural correlates of Chinese developmental dyslexia have been studied extensively in the past twenty years or so, providing us with a rich understanding of Chinese developmental dyslexia.