How well can you identify other people's voices? Most of us are good at recognizing a familiar speaker we can't see. This skill works best, though, in our native tongue. And to the ears of a dyslexic person, everyone else may as well be speaking Chinese.
Dyslexia is usually described as a reading disorder. In school, a dyslexic kid will struggle to recognize words and parse sentences. She (or more often, according to some studies, he) might have assignments read aloud or receive prewritten class notes.
Underneath this difficulty with reading, though, may lie a failure to correctly process the sounds that make up words. To explore this theory, researchers at MIT had 16 dyslexic adults and older teens, as well as 16 non-dyslexics, listen to a series of recorded sentences. The voices they heard belonged to ten males, five speaking English and five speaking Mandarin Chinese (a language none ...
