Abstract:

Developmental dyslexia is a major type of learning disability that severely hinders the development of cognitive, emotional and social adaptability. Writing is closely related to reading, and individuals with dyslexia usually show writing difficulties. At the behavioral level, dyslexic individuals exhibit impairments in writing quality and speed and take longer more pauses. At the neural level, neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that dyslexic individuals show altered functional activation in visual word regions and altered functional and structural connectivity between linguistic and motor regions. Generally, convergent evidence points to the impairment of orthographic access in dyslexic individuals during writing, but it remains unknown whether they also have difficulty in orthographic-motor transformation and motor execution. Writing is more strongly related to reading in Chinese than in alphabetic languages. The study of writing deficits would have value for developing unique diagnosis and treatment strategies for Chinese dyslexia.

Key words: developmental dyslexia, Chinese, writing, neural mechanisms