More than a few times over the past year when students have asked me to spell words or names during class time I’ve responded by saying things like: John … ‘Ruh’, ‘A’, ‘Wuh’, ‘Luh’, ‘Su’, … Rawls. It’s a habit picked up from helping Emily, my 8 year-old navigate the vagaries of English spelling. And those vagaries are notoriously thorny. More than 25% of English words use irregular spellings and most of those words are the ones we use most often. Of course Emily thought the issue pretty daft: words should sound how they look. That they don’t was another example of adults trying to trick her. At least English adults. When she looks at words in Spanish, her mother’s first language, she realises to her delight that words do sound the way they look. As a result it’s much easier for her to pronounce the written word and read Spanish without stumbling and asking, ‘how do you say this word’? Has she learned to read Spanish quicker than English? Probably not due to the amount of time she’s immersed in Spanish in comparison with English.

However, the principle that learning to read a language that is more regular in its spelling than one that is not, is supported by research. It takes Spanish kids only a few months to be able to read and write any word they come across whilst English kids labour at it through much of primary school. More significant than this difference in time however, is the connection between the difficulty of mastering the orthography of a language and the incidence of dyslexia. Twice as many 10 year-old kids in the US experience dyslexia as compared to those in Italy.

The interesting question is whether such differences have a neurolocial basis – ie do the brains of dyslexics across different languages have different processing problems? – or whether, there are other, more cultural and orthographic explanations for the differences.  Here’s Professor Uta Frith from UCL reporting on some European research into these questions:

[wpaudio url="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed/audio/neuroscience/frith/podcasts/frith_dyslexia_english.mp3" text="The English language and dyslexia in Europe"]

This research proves the existence of a universal neurological basis for dyslexia. It also highlights the impact that the complexity of orthography can have on reading proficiency of dyslexics and therefore the severity of the disease and the ease of diagnosis. This means that in the Italian population there may be hidden cases of dyslexia. On the other hand, otherwise mild cases of dyslexia may appear far worse in irregular orthographies like that of English or French.

It also might suggest that a simplification of English orthography would ease the severity of the disease and the ease of diagnosis. Maybe Emily is ruh, ii, guh, hu, tu!