Word: dyslexia
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...past couple of decades, scientists have learned a great deal about the neurological causes of dyslexia. But what they hadn't yet explained is why its incidence varies so from country to country--and what that difference means. Last week, Italian, French and British researchers proposed an answer. The variability, they wrote in Science, depends greatly on the complexity of writing systems. The team offered what it described as the first compelling evidence that the disorder has a common neurological basis across linguistic and cultural boundaries...
...different ways of spelling its 40 phonemes, the sounds required to pronounce all its words. By contrast, Italian needs only 33 combinations of letters to spell out its 25 phonemes. As a result, reading Italian takes a lot less effort, and that's probably why the reported rate of dyslexia in Italy is barely half that in the U.S., where about 15% of the population is affected to varying degrees. By some estimates, Americans spend more than $1 billion a year to help their kids cope with dyslexia. Many Italian dyslexics, on the other hand, aren't even aware they...
Explaining this discrepancy isn't all that the study has accomplished. By helping establish a universal neurological basis for dyslexia, the scientists make it clear that teachers ought to think twice before they dismiss the reality of a child's dyslexia. This, sad to say, still happens all too often more than a century after the disorder was first identified...
Mary Boies says her husband approaches the world with such seemingly unaffected calm "because he comes from nonfancy people." His parents were both teachers. In 1954 they packed David, 13, and their three younger children into the family Plymouth and moved from Illinois to California. Although undiagnosed dyslexia had prevented him from learning to read until he was in the third grade, by high school David was a pretty good student, an excellent debater and so proficient a bridge player that he hired himself out as a paid tournament partner for adults trying to rack up master points...
...Boies memory is one of the first things cited when people discuss his strengths. What's most impressive about that gift--focused as it may be by the intensified concentration that his dyslexia demands--is Boies' uncanny ability to recall a key fact, legal citation or piece of contradictory testimony at moments of the most intense pressure. Monday, Dec. 11, Boies to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: "The language you're referring to is at page 268 of the Southern Reporter." The Southern Reporter? When did Boies memorize the Southern freaking Reporter? His wife says his ability to distinguish that...