The Role of Orthography in Dyslexia

Abstract

The objective of the paper is to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the syllabic and alpha-syllabic writing system and the role of grapheme to phoneme conversion among dyslexic children. Researches in the area of learning disabilities have established that dyslexia is a developmental reading disorder that manifests itself in the problems relating to word recognition and the comprehension of written language. With the average or the above average intelligence, both reading and spelling errors can indicate the sign of dyslexia. There are biological as well as environmental factors linked to dyslexia, the primary characteristics of difficulties are associated with reading and writing. Hindi (Hindi and its sub-group) is spoken as a first language in India by about 41.03% of the total population (census, 2001) but most of the Hindi speakers also learn English. This means that they grow up learning one orthographically shallow or transparent language (language- Hindi, script- Devanagari) and another orthographically deep or opaque language (language – English, script – Roman). There are various studies on bilingual/biliterates with respect to English and more regular scripts like, Spanish, German etc., or English and non-alphabetic script like Chinese. However, there are very few researches on writing difficulties with respect to alpha-syllabary scripts such as Indic scripts and English. The first part of the paper traces the language based research and theories of dyslexia which characterise it basically as a linguistic processing problem. The second part of the paper traces the provisions granted by the central and the state governments of India for dyslexic children.