Dyslexia

Rrgh, I still don't have my account back.

Today's post will deal with dyslexia and phonology.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071020083954.htm

Briefly, the article is a critique of dyslexia research because of the vagueness of terms thrown around to diagnose the disorder, and the circular reasoning often employed by researchers. Apparently, researchers often cite phonology (translation of sounds into letters, or just processing of sounds) as the cause of dyslexia (basically poor phonology causes it), but then they also call this the effect (dyslexia causes bad phonology). Heck, nobody really knows what phonology means [the article seems to claim].

I did some background research on dyslexia (read: wikipedia), and I think there's a more interesting concept at play here. See, many people think that phonology is innate; for example, some figure named Gwen Slaughter (who had a great Google Pagerank, so I'm assuming she's famous...) said there's a "phoneme module" in the brain dedicated to this translation between sounds and writing. Now we talked about how this isn't necessarily a correct theory since language may not have a specialized neurological mechanism and instead be learned through general learning processes. But the innate, specialized theory seems to fit the evidence here - dyslexia affects people in a very localized manner, people who are intelligent in all other respects.

So we talked about this in class (i only wrote half of this before class) and we learned about the research showing different connections between the aural and visual cortexes of the brain. So that would suggest that it's not really some module that's broken, it's just that some people are wired so that incidentally, writing is difficult. But I wonder if this is an empty definition...what I mean is that if there's no other deficit between the aural and visual processing, then the wonky neural pathways must be really a specialized bunch between the aural and visual areas of the brain, and we might as well call that a "module." Like, it would prove the point that phoneme to writing translation doesn't have a module if in addition to dyslexia, someone couldn't match sounds to a visible object, or like sight singing music was very difficult, but no such correlations exist (actually I wonder about the sight singing - does anybody know about this?). Anyway, it just seems to suggest that something in the brain is specialized for writing. Or, writing may just be one of those near-limit activities for humans, becaus 16% seems awfully high for a disorder occurrence (a failure of this module).

Last point. I hate to say this, Nikola, but I talked to my mom today (she's a speech therapist) and she basically echoed what Steve said in class, that stuttering is a motor problem, and failure to recall words is different altogether (not aphasia, but anomia).

uhoh

Hi everybody, this will be my temporary blog for as long as it takes to reconquer my email address. It was hacked into last Thursday, and since Blogger is linked to Gmail, I've lost control of the old blog.

Anyway, today's entry will deal with language extinction.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid=20071027.E02&irec=1

(interestingly, the jakarta post shows up disproportionately on my news alert. anyone else?) In Indonesia, over 700 languages exist, and I guess they mean "languages" in a stronger way than dialects. Skipping most of the details, the article goes on to say that a couple regions are densely populated with languages, but with speaker counts as low as 10 people. The minimum threshold for language preservation is 100,000 people, so these languages are headed for extinction. The main forces contributing to extinction involve "linguicide" which basically is an effect of oppression or genocide, the dominant language taking over, and socio-political forces (of assimilation?).

So after this, the article makes, in my opinion, the huge logical leap of positing a solution to the problem (this isn't the leap) and then declaring that the Indonesian government has a moral responsibility to implement the solution. I'm still left scratching my head, wondering why this is a problem, and how this article decided that it's important for " endangered indigenous languages -- a nation's precious cultural heritage -- be maintained and conserved in this globalized world." There are lots of concrete advantages to having a dominant language that unites a country, but how much cultural heritage and identity can you need within your own country? Because, I agree that language is central to culture, so the individual trademarks of some Indonesian island will disappear after you take away their little language, but who cares? From the standpoint of prosperity, they'll be better able to integrate with the rest of the country and horizons will open up. Now, let's assume for a second that it is important for Indonesian culture to survive in a "globalized world." Is an Indonesian culture that consists of the dominant language and traditions any worse of an identity than Indonesia composed of many different subcultures (and languages)? The advantages of diverse-er culture would probably be very indirect, and I'd like to find out what they are - I do not however agree with the commonly thrown-around statement that culture is intrinsically good simply because it's rich or beautiful or any of those other empty adjectives.