The rarity of reading disability in Japanese children.

A study reported here indicates that the prevalence of dyslexia in Japan (0.98%) is some ten times lower than in Western countries. Transcultural epidemiology of reading disability is hardly found in psychiatric literature. No investigators refer to specific features of language and script, the direct object of reading behavior. It is proposed in this paper that the specificity of the used language is the most potent contributing factor in the formation of reading disability.