Reading Disability in Chinese Children Learning English as an L2

Abstract

To examine whether there are common or specific deficits of reading disability (RD) in first (L1) and second languages (L2), Chinese children (9-11 years, N = 76) with or without RD who learn English as an L2 were studied during a visual word rhyming judgment task. Evidence was found for common deficits in L1 and L2 in visuoorthographic processes in left inferior temporal gyrus and left precuneus, as well as in phonological processes in left dorsal inferior frontal gyrus as children with RD showed less activation than controls in both languages. Furthermore, the visuo-orthographic deficit appears to be a RD effect, whereas the phonological deficit appears to be a reading/performance effect. Some weak evidence for language specific effects was also found.

Convergent and divergent structural and functional brain abnormalities associated with developmental dyslexia: a cross-linguistic meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies

“…Siok et al (2004Siok et al ( , 2008 found that Chinese children with DD showed reduced activation at the left MFG during a homophone judgment task. Cao et al (2017Cao et al ( , 2020) also found reduced activation in the left dorsal IFG in Chinese children with DD compared to agematched controls and reading-matched controls during an auditory rhyming task and a visual rhyming judgment task. A similar hypoactivation in the left dorsal IFG was also reported in morphological tasks in Chinese (Liu et al, 2012(Liu et al, , 2013b.…”

“…This region tends to show reduced brain activation in alphabetic languages as demonstrated in a cross-linguistic study of English, Italian and French (Paulesu et al, 2001) and several meta-analysis studies in alphabetic languages (Maisog et al, 2008;Martin et al, 2016;Paulesu et al, 2014;Richlan et al, 2009Richlan et al, , 2011. The left OT area, including the middle occipital gyrus (MOG), inferior temporal gyrus (ITG) and fusiform gyrus, has been consistently found to show reduced activation in individuals with DD across morpho-syllabic and alphabetic languages (Bolger et al, 2008;Cao et al, 2020;Centanni et al, 2019;Chyl et al, 2018;Paz-Alonso et al, 2018). This region is associated with visuo-orthographic processing during reading (Glezer et al, 2016(Glezer et al, ., 2019.…”

“…Specifically, consistent reduction of brain activation was found in a left OT area regardless of orthographic depth including the left ITG, MTG, and inferior occipital gyrus, whereas greater reduction was found in the left fusiform gyrus, left TP and left IFG pars orbitalis in transparent orthographies than in opaque orthographies, and greater reduction in the bilateral intraparietal sulcus, left precuneus and left IFG pars triangularis was found in opaque orthographies than in transparent orthographies. In a recent study on Chinese-English bilingual children with DD, researchers also found both language-universal deficits at the left ITG, the precuneus and dorsal IFG and language-specific deficits at the left IPL for Chinese and the left ventral IFG for English (Cao et al, 2020).These findings suggest that there are both language-universal and language-specific deficits across languages.…”

“…Because there were many more functional studies included in the alphabetic group than in the morpho-syllabic group, and most of the morpho-syllabic studies focused on children, the language difference may be due to these differences in the two groups of studies. To avoid influences of these factors, we selected ten English studies (Booth et al, 2007a;Cao et al, 2008;Farris et al, 2016;Hancock et al, 2016;Hu et al, 2010;Langer et al, 2015;Meyler et al, 2008;Olulade et al, 2015;Rimrodt et al, 2009;Temple et al, 2001) and ten Chinese studies (Cao et al, 2018(Cao et al, , 2020Feng et al, 2017;Hu et al, 2010;Liu et al, 2012Liu et al, , 2013bSiok et al, 2004Siok et al, , 2008Siok et al, , 2009Yang & Tan, 2020) for further confirmation analysis. The two subgroups were matched on participants' age (mean age = 10.95 years for English studies, mean age = 11.40 years for Chinese studies) and task (visual word tasks).…”

“…Chinese characters also have complex visuo-spatial configurations, which require an increasing involvement of visual-orthographic analysis at the bilateral precuneus (Cao et al, 2013). That explains the fact that the precuneus showed consistent deficit in Chinese DD (Cao et al, 2018(Cao et al, , 2020. Ziegler (2006) argued that Chinese readers with DD should share a common neurocognitive deficit that DD readers have in alphabetic languages, because Chinese reading is essentially the process of mapping from orthography to phonology and meaning as alphabetic languages do and Chinese readers with DD also show phonological deficits (Goswami et al, 2011;Hu et al, 2010).…”