Does dyslexia affect the ability to learn languages?
Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty that causes problems mainly with reading, writing, and spelling. Although unlike a learning disability, intelligence is not affected. It is estimated that 1 in 10 people have some degree of dyslexia in the UK. Dyslexia is a lifelong problem that presents challenges on a daily basis.
Dyslexia is often associated with difficulties consisting of accurate and fluent word recognition along with many other aspects of producing and using language. Dyslexia is often inherited, and many studies suggest it has neurobiological origins. Dyslexic people tend to have a smaller working memory capacity compared to the average person. On the other hand, people with dyslexia often have good skills in other areas such as creative thinking and problem solving.
As dyslexic people often have a harder time remembering things it becomes harder to apply the knowledge in the field of languages as they may forget to focus on grammar, punctuation, and struggle to form a full sentence in another language. On top of this many dyslexic people have a reduced phonemic awareness meaning difficulty when it comes to perceiving differences between sounds. This causes difficulty reading not only in their first language but their second. Some languages are more problematic for dyslexic learners such as French and English as the sounds of the language don’t match clearly to letter combinations. While Spanish, Italian and German are more transparent languages with understandable letter-sound correspondence.
When studying a language many dyslexic people find it beneficial to use multi-sensory learning to help them.
