Like a family dog whose time has come, Mir has been beset with a slew of ailments in the past year, including an onboard fire, collision with a cargo vessel, and multiple failures of onboard computers. But there's a silver lining to this tragic tale. The good people at Taco Bell Corp. have decided to turn the closing chapter of Soviet glory in space into a bit of fun for the whole family. Because of English's notorious love for breaking the rules of common sense when it come to spelling, English speaking countries show higher rates of dyslexia when compared to other countries. While English speakers use just 40 different sounds, they must memorize as many as 1120 different spelling combinations for them.
Scientists refer to spelling rules, or orthographies, as deep or shallow.
English is an example of a language with a deep orthography. Contrast it with the shallow orthography of Italian, which has 25 sounds and a mere 33 letter combinations to make them. Brain images taken while dyslexics performed certain reading tasks showed diminished activity in the left temporal lobe, an important language center, when compared to the control group. Although all dyslexics, regardless of language, showed difficulty in reading tasks, Italian dyslexics performed better than their French and English counterparts. The physiological data provides support for a neurological basis for dyslexia although differences between dyslexics of various countries may have its origins in the complexities of spelling.