Developmental dyslexia across languages and writing systems: The big picture

Abstract

In this final chapter, we provide our view on some of the main conclusions that can be drawn from the research on developmental dyslexia across languages. The overarching questions concern how our understanding of reading disability benefits from considering a broad array of languages. If there is a universal biological basis of developmental dyslexia, there should be shared observations on reading disability across languages and writing systems. Or, so one might expect. It is possible, however, that observations of differences in the manifestations of dyslexia - whether subtyping within a language (e.g., phonological vs surface dyslexia) or comparisons across languages (e.g., alphabetic vs morphosyllabic) - reflect some unitary cause or combinations of multiple causes.