Dyslexia in Bilinguals

Abstract

Bilingualism may be viewed as an experiment of nature given to the neurolinguist, not unlike agenesis of the corpus callosum, in order to clarify questions of brain-language correlations. Thus I approach the study of alexia in bilinguals with the assumption that it will tell about hew the brain handles reading, in monolinguals as well as bilinguals. For example, using monolingual subjects it has proven impossible so far to determine whether, in the early stages of reading, at the letter identification stage, there is phonological processing going on in addition to letter name labeling. If one studies bilingual subjects who read two alphabets which share phonemes, but not graphic representations of them, as Shanon and Balzano (1980) have done with Hebrew-English readers, one can determine whether the phonological or the naming characteristics are primary, and the extent to which they interact.

Thanks are due to Linda Manganaro for help in sorting through the literature on polyglot aphasia in order to locate cases with reading impairment. Particular thanks are due to Eva Baharav for her help in coding these materials, researching additional ones, and providing many contributions in the course of drafting this paper. Thanks also to Howard Gardner and Normal Geschwind for directing me to pertinent cases and literature and to Michel Paradis for sharing Hiroko Hagiwara’s Masters dissertation with me.