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).