Dyslexia seems to be more of an issue in English than other languages right?

But also, maybe the difficulty of parsing recruits other/executive function and is beneficial in other ways?

The per phoneme density/efficiency of English is supposed to be quite high as an emergent trade language.

Perhapse speaking a certain language would promote slower more intentional parsing, humility through syntax uncertainty, maybe not, all I know is that from a global network resilience perspective it's good that dumb memes have difficulty propagating across cultures/languages.

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adamzwasserman 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The dyslexia point is interesting; yes, English orthography causes more reading disorders than languages with more regular spelling-to-sound mappings (Italian, Finnish, etc.). That's consistent with the parser having to work harder when the signal is noisier.

Your intuition about "slower more intentional parsing" connects to something I'm exploring: we may parse language at two levels simultaneously; a fast, nearly autonomic level (think: how insults land before you consciously process them) and a slower deliberate level. Whether those levels interact differently across languages is an open question.

	▲	tgv 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		First: dyslexia has little to do with parsing, which is generally understood to relate to structure/relations between words. Second: multiple levels of language processing have been identified, although it's not at all clear how well separated they are. The higher levels (semantics, pragmatics) are by necessity lagging behind the lower (phonetics, syntax). The higher levels also seem more "deliberate."

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coldtea 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>Dyslexia seems to be more of an issue in English than other languages right?

I don't think so. It's medicalization or pathologization of dyslexia that's probably more of a thing in Engish. Same way many issues get medicalized and whole cottage industries and jobs grow around them