17-20 April 2004 - Japan - Kobe Symposium on Dyslexia

Background

In the UK and the USA it is generally recognized that between 5-10% of English speakers have unexpected difficulty learning to read despite having at least normal general intelligence; this is known as developmental dyslexia. This is a potent cause of individual misery and family distress. However, it has been argued that dyslexia is far less prevalent in Japan or China because these languages use logographic rather than alphabetic, phoneme based, scripts and do not suffer the multiplicity of irregular spellings (such as yacht for "yot") that characterize English. Indeed subjects have been found who are dyslexic in English but not in Japanese, and in Kana, the Japanese phonetic script, but not in logographic Kanji.

However recent genetic, neuropathological, physiological and brain imaging studies have shown that developmental dyslexia results from impaired development of auditory, visual, and motor aspects of basic brain function that are likely to be as common in Japan as in the UK. Hence we may have to revise the assumption that dyslexia is far less common in Japan, design studies to determine how prevalent it actually is in Japan, and also consider the possibility that the brain differences might manifest in rather different ways.

This Oxford-Kobe symposium will bring experts on the biological and psychological basis of dyslexia in European languages together with the growing community of Japanese researchers interested in dyslexia in Japan, to share our knowledge. We aim to include influential policy makers and educationalists to kindle interest and disseminate recent findings about dyslexia to the wider community in Japan. We anticipate that this 2004 symposium will kindle enough interest in Japan to promote subsequent series of symposia in this field.

Organised by:

• Prof. John Stein, University Laboratory of Physiology, Oxford
• Dr. Masao Ito, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Tokyo
• Dr Michael Miller, RIKEN, Brain Science Institute, Tokyo