In another lexical decision task, English-German bilinguals take as long and make as many errors for rejecting pseudowords containing orthographic sequences specific to German, for example, ... the words starting with 'pf', which is legal in German but illegal in English. So, they made as many mistakes, and they took longer for rejecting those kind of pseudowords as for rejecting pseudowords displaying orthographic sequences specific to English, for example, sequences starting with 'tw' which are specific to English; they do not exist in German. Also in lexical decision(s), Hebrew-English bilinguals show strong priming effects when the targets are preceded by the translation in the other language. And this is really astonishing because Hebrew is read from right to left and English is read from left to right. In lexical decisions again, Dutch-English bilinguals show similar priming effect(s) when the item preceding the target is homophonous to the target, so it sounds the same, according to the grapheme-phoneme correspondences of either of the two languages. So this means that the grapheme-phoneme correspondences of both languages are activated, even though the participants are inclined or are asked to use only one language. In other words, when a person learns to read and spell in two languages it seems that the grapheme-phoneme correspondences, the phonological representations and the orthographic representations of both languages are activated simultaneously to some degree. Now let's turn to the difficult topic of dyslexia and bilingualism. As I said before, there are not many studies on dyslexia and bilingualism. What we can say is that the acquisition of a second language is notoriously difficult for dyslexic learners, and this relates to the difficulties with short-term and long-term memory. So the memorization of the whole vocabulary of a second language can be very challenging for them. And obviously the learning of a second writing system is even more challenging for them. However, from my own practice with lots of bilingual dyslexic children, I would like to say that dyslexic or not, some children have more facilities than others in acquiring a second language. And I'm talking here about oral language. In some dyslexics it is not so much of a problem to acquire new labels for the objects they already know in one language. Here again we need to make a clear distinction as I just did between the oral language acquisition and the written language learning. At the oral level, the dyslexic learners need to learn the series of new labels, the names of the objects in the target language. If the second language has phonemes of phonemic contrast which do not exist in the first language, learners are more likely to show even more difficulties than non-dyslexic learners to master these phonemes or contrasts given their overall difficulties to build abstract and well-specified representations of phonemes in general. As you will remember, this links to the difficulty of mastering, even for non-dyslexics, the contrasts which do not exist in the native language. When acquiring the writing system of the second language, the dyslexic learners be confronted, will have to learn, a whole series of new grapheme-phoneme correspondences, which is very difficult, especially for dyslexic learners. This is even more difficult as some correspondences may be in conflict with the ones already learn(t) in their native language. Take just one example of correspondence between one grapheme and one phoneme. 'o u' is usually pronounced 'ow' in English (as) in 'cloud', (but there are other pronunciations as well so that makes it difficult). So that's for English. But it's pronounced 'oo' in French (as) in the word 'trou' which means hole. So, moreover, the phoneme 'oo' does not exist in French and the phoneme 'oo' is represented (in English) with two vowels which never appear together in French, which is 'oo', for example, in 'good'. Therefore, the best advice we can give is to avoid as much as possible, contacts with the written langauge, with a written system of a second langauge, while insisting on the learning of the oral language of that second language. Another question we may ask is (it's also a difficult question) are some languages easier to learn than others? Well, it seems to be the case but the answer again, is not straightforward. Some languages display more phonemes and ... contrasts which (do) not exist in the first language, depending on the first language-second language similarities and differences. So these new elements will be particularly difficult to represent and to link consequently, to link to the appropriate grapheme for dyslexic learners. There are also enormous variations regarding the complexity of written system of languages. Some languages ... ... have a writing system called TRANSPARENT. Words are basically written as they are pronounced and are pronounced as they are spelled. In these language the same phoneme is nearly always written down with the same grapheme and vice versa. For examples of transparent languages: Italian, Spanish and German, to a lesser extent, Dutch. Other languages display a writing system called OPAQUE. The same phoneme can be spelled in many different ways and vice versa. The same grapheme can be pronounced in many different ways. English is actually the most opaque alphabetical language (in) the world, followed by French from a theoretical point of view, so this has consequences from a theoretical point of view. It is true that (a) dyslexic will have more facility learning in a transparent orthographic system compared to an opaque orthographic system. However, in real life, things are much more complicated and need to be nuanced. And I think that one factor that must be taken into account is the motivation of the learner to learn this language rather than (that) language. What research suggests, though, is that if one of the languages of the learner, of a dyslexic learner, is more transparent than the other, reading and writing in this language may help because of the training of the phonological recoding route. This may help the acquisition or reading, and spelling, and writing in the less transparent language.
