Dyslexia: Symbol processing difficulty in the Kannada language

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether among children who speak Kannada, a Dravidian language from South India, there are those who show the same pattern of specific dyslexia as has been found to occur in children who speak European languages. The performances of 14 dyslexic children, aged between 8 and 10 years, whose native language was Kannada, were compared on a variety of tasks with fourteen normal readers and fourteen non-dyslexic poor readers. There were no significant differences between the three groups on tests of visual discrimination, visual recognition, visual recall, memory for shapes in sequence, or auditory discrimination. There were differences, however, between the dyslexics and the normal readers on tests of recall of auditorily presented digits, word analysis, word synthesis, and on two tests of visual-verbal association. The non-dyslexic poor readers were more similar to the dyslexics on recall of auditorily presented digits and word synthesis but more similar to the normal readers on word analysis and on the two tests of visual-verbal association. It is argued that these results are evidence of a consistent pattern in specific dyslexia which does not depend on any one writing system or geographical location.