A paper by the University of Hong Kong’s Li-Hai Tan and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that people who are dyslexic in one language may not have problems with other languages — particularily if the dyslexia is in a alphabetically written language as opposed to a symbolically written one:
People suffering from dyslexia may find that their problems evaporate when they learn a new language, especially one that works with symbols very different from their native one. A study released yesterday reveals that brain abnormalities in English-speakers with dyslexia are quite different from those in people who speak Chinese. So it’s very possible that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese wouldn’t be in English, and vice versa.
(Thanks, Marilyn!)