Dyslexia in bilingual children: The Philippine experience.

This paper provides a brief overview of how language and specifically, reading, are represented in the bilingual brain. The literature suggests that while there are cortical sites that are common to both languages, there are distinct language-specific sites as well. The first language also appears to influence representation of the second language. In addition, factors such as proficiency in the language, age of acquisition of the language, and other language-specific factors, including orthography and script, seem to contribute to the neural representation. Reading and dyslexia in bilingual populations are likewise discussed briefly. Finally, this paper takes a look at dyslexia in bilingual children in the Philippine context. Filipino children present a unique perspective because literacy development in two languages (Filipino and English) occurs simultaneously. Furthermore, they must learn two writing systems with extreme differences in orthographic depth. The results of a study in this population yielded four profiles of dyslexia and underscored how differences in the two languages can impact upon the manifestations of poor word reading. (Author)