Tuesday, October 13, 2009

difference between English and Chinese dyslexia


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091012121333.htm

In contrast, the new findings show that developmental dyslexia in Chinese is really two disorders: a visuospatial deficit and a phonological disorder combined.

Siok and her colleague Li Hai Tan say the difference can be traced to the characteristics of the two languages. "In English, the alphabetic letters that form visual words are pronounceable, so access to the pronunciation of English words is made possible by using letter-to-sound conversion rules," Siok said. "Written Chinese maps graphic forms—i.e., characters—onto meanings; Chinese characters possess a number of intricate strokes packed into a square configuration, and their pronunciations must be memorized by rote. This characteristic suggests that a fine-grained visuospatial analysis must be performed by the visual system in order to activate the characters' phonological and semantic information.

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With respect to HIOXian:

HIOXian lacks "intricate strokes" and "fine-grained visuospatial" detail.
Any particular phoneme/phonete symbol is roughly comparable to the visual complexity of the Roman Alphabet.

I suppose the proposed scheme to colour-code stacked consonant clusters and vowels could encounter learning disabilities. However, that system is strictly optional.
Hmm, guess I hafta pick the colours for that with colour blindness in mind.
Enough males have it that it needs to be treated as the same seriousness as dyslexia.

To reiterate, HIOXian lacks any visual component for meaning smaller than a dash: -.
This means it can be read by ageing folk with visual problems, it can scan and copy easily without too much degradation, it is forgiving of errors.

I was looking at Omniglot.com. Visual English by Bell has many very fine swirls and flourishes that convey essential meaning. They would not display well on a computer monitor. They also are not easy to write quickly and neatly.
From the point of view of a typesetter, Visual English is handy, since like the Cree syllabary, the symbols are recycled by rotating by increments of 90 degrees.
This is not a concern of mine. I am concerned with computer typing on one hand, and cursive writing on the other.
Visual English also illustrates the struggle between incorporating elements into the core symbols versus using various after-the-fact diacritics, accents and even specialized additional characters. IPA also struggled with this design issue.

I'd like to point out that even without the up/down spacing of consonants/vowels, the symbols would still be clear to a literate end user. Don't quote me just yet, but I don't think any vowel symbol will correspond with a consonant symbol. In fact, I mean to plan ahead enough that there is no such confusion.
This makes the up/down spacing simply an additional redundant way to convey information.
For English, it would serve to faciliate learning HIOXian as well as to increase reading speed.
English has enough phonemes that they will not map onto HIOXian without use of accents to convey additional information. This should not be an issue for Decimese.
To avoid the need for diacritics for Decimese, I will need to incorporate such features as plosives, fricatives, glides and semi-liquids into the core character.
PB TD KG SZ FV, LRWY, H. AEIOU.
I think I could live with LRWY and H requiring diacritics.

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