Acquired dyslexia in Spanish: a review and some observations on a new case of deep dyslexia

Readers and writers of Spanish use an orthography that is highly transparent. It has been proposed that readers of Spanish can rely on grapheme-phoneme correspondences, alone, to access meaning or phonology from print. In recent years, a number of case studies have yielded evidence inconsistent with this idea. We review these studies with particular focus on those that report evidence for reading based on direct lexical mappings between print, orthographic representations, and meaning or phonology. We report a new case of acquired literacy impairment in Spanish, MJ, who presents a pattern of preserved abilities and deficits symptomatic of deep dyslexia. The patient is unable to read nonwords, but can read a substantial number of words. Her reading is characterized by the production of semantic, visual, and derivational errors. We argue that MJ has a deficit in her lexical selection ability, common to both her reading and her naming problems. We propose that MJ, and the other cases we review, demonstrate that lexical reading is adopted by skilled readers even in a transparent language.     

Two different dysgraphic syndromes in a regular orthography, spanish

In opaque orthographies, such as English and French, three central dysgraphic syndromes have been described: surface dysgraphia, phonological dysgraphia, and deep dysgraphia. Writing breakdown patterns reveal that spelling can proceed by phoneme-to-grapheme conversion, or by a more direct or lexical approach. Ardila et al. (1989, 1991) claim that for Spanish speakers a lexical strategy for reading and writing is not an option due to the regularity of the orthography of this language. In this study we report two clear cases of dysgraphia in Spanish, one of surface dysgraphia and another of phonological dysgraphia, where a dissociation between lexical and sublexical writing can be observed, thus contradicting Ardila's position.     

Developmental Deep Dyslexia in Japanese: A Case Study

This report demonstrates the existence of developmental deep dyslexia involving Japanese orthography. When asked to read (or name) isolated kanji, T.S., a sixth grader with a normal IQ and no speech impairment, produced a number of visual, selection, and semantic errors. It is suggested that these errors arise from an interaction between phonological coding impairment and the relative sparing of direct visual processing, which are taken to be characteristic of developmental deep dyslexia. A selection hypothesis is presented to explain selection errors, semantic errors, and some peculiar phenomena observed in acquired dyslexics.     

Cognitive structure of writing disorders in Russian: what would Luria say?

Acquired disorders of writing in the Russian language have been reported for more than a century. The study of these disorders reflects the history of Russian neuropsychology and is dominated by the syndrome approach most notably by the writings of Luria. Indeed, our understanding of acquired dysgraphia in Russian speakers is conceptualized according to the classical approach in Modern Russia. In this review, we describe the classical approach and compare it to the cognitive neuropsychological models of writing disorders that are developed to explain dysgraphia in English and in other Western European languages. We argue that the basic theoretical assumptions of the two approaches - cognitive and classical or syndrome approach - share similarities. It is therefore proposed that identification of acquired cases of dysgraphia in Russian could potentially benefit from taking the cognitive neuropsychological perspective. We also conclude that adopting elements of the syndrome approach would substantially enrich the understanding of acquired dysgraphia since these offer an insight into processes not described in the cognitive neuropsychological approach.     

Orthography as a handicap? A direct comparison of spelling acquisition in Danish and Icelandic

Spelling of cross-linguistically very similar nonwords was compared in 115 Danish and 77 Icelandic children (primarily 3rd and 4th graders). Danish children made more errors than Icelandic children on word medial consonant doublets and on word initial consonant clusters, even when the groups compared were matched on simpler spelling tasks. These results suggest that the acquisition of phonemic encoding skills is slower in "deep" orthography such as Danish than in more "transparent" orthography such as Icelandic. The effect of orthography was expected for consonant doublets because of the relatively more complex sound-letter correspondences in Danish. For consonant clusters, however, sound-letter correspondences are perfectly regular in both languages. The study thus points to the conclusion that even the mastery of regular sound-letter correspondences may be delayed in deep orthography.     

书面字形在汉语低年级儿童口语词汇学习中的作用

采用配对联想学习范式, 通过2个实验, 系统考察了书面字形在汉语低年级儿童口语词汇学习中的作用。实验一以40名二年级学生为研究对象, 控制了假字的形旁透明度, 操纵了声旁的规则性, 要求儿童分别在规则字、不规则字和无字形条件下学习4个新异物体的名称, 结果发现呈现不规则汉字阻碍了儿童口语词汇的学习;实验二以27名一年级学生为研究对象, 采用相同的配对联想学习范式, 同时操纵了假字的声旁规则性和形旁透明度, 再次发现了不规则汉字的阻碍效应, 并且发现透明形旁对口语词汇学习的促进作用。整个研究表明, 书面字形在汉语儿童口语词汇学习中具有重要作用, 这对今后的教学实践和理论研究都具有重要启示意义。     

Afferent dysgraphia after right cerebral stroke: an autonomous syndrome?

Afferent dysgraphia is an acquired writing deficit characterized by deletions and duplications of letters and strokes. The commonly accepted interpretation states that afferent dysgraphia is associated with three main clinical features: production of spatial writing errors; the presence of left unilateral neglect; and no deterioration in performance when writing blindfolded. In order to test whether these symptoms necessarily co-occur with afferent dysgraphia, we studied the writing performances of a series of eight right brain-damaged patients. In sentence copying, spontaneous handwriting, and writing to dictation they showed afferent dysgraphia. However, signs of left neglect and spatial dysgraphia were evident only in some cases. Furthermore, the frequency of afferent errors increased when patients were required to write without vision. The present study demonstrates that afferent dysgraphia is an autonomous clinical entity and that it results from a selective impairment of a mechanism whose function is that of comparing the information about the number of letters and strokes specified at the level of letter motor programs and the actual number of movements already realized.     

Lexical and semantic age-of-acquisition effects on word naming in Spanish

We report a study of the factors that affect reading in Spanish, a language with a transparent orthography. Our focus was on the influence of lexical semantic knowledge in phonological coding. This effect would be predicted to be minimal in Spanish, according to some accounts of semantic effects in reading. We asked 25 healthy adults to name 2,764 mono- and multisyllabic words. As is typical for psycholinguistics, variables capturing critical word attributes were highly intercorrelated. Therefore, we used principal components analysis (PCA) to derive orthogonalized predictors from raw variables. The PCA distinguished components relating to (1) word frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and familiarity; (2) word AoA, imageability, and familiarity; (3) word length and orthographic neighborhood size; and (4) bigram type and token frequency. Linear mixed-effects analyses indicated significant effects on reading due to each PCA component. Our observations confirm that oral reading in Spanish proceeds through spelling–sound mappings involving lexical and sublexical units. Importantly, our observations distinguish between the effect of lexical frequency (the impact of the component relating to frequency, AoA, and familiarity) and the effect of semantic knowledge (the impact of the component relating to AoA, imageability, and familiarity). Semantic knowledge influences word naming even when all the words being read have regular spelling–sound mappings.     

Deep dyslexia and semantic errors: a test of the failure of inhibition hypothesis using a semantic blocking paradigm

Deep dyslexia is an acquired reading disorder that involves the production of semantic errors and the inability to read aloud nonwords successfully. Several explanations for this reading impairment posit multiple loci of damage to account for the various error types produced in deep dyslexia. In contrast, the failure of inhibition hypothesis suggests that damage in the phonological output lexicon alone can explain these errors. Specifically, this hypothesis proposes normal processing via orthographic and phonological reading routes, as well as an intact semantic system. However, slowed or reduced inhibitory connections result in the failure to suppress spuriously activated neighbours in the phonological output lexicon, where neighbourhood can be defined in terms of phonology, orthography, or semantics. Given a failure to inhibit semantically related candidates, semantic reading errors occur. Important to the test of this hypothesis is that it evolves several predictions that are contrary to performance observed in the normal population. In particular, semantic errors are predicted to be greater in conditions where words are blocked according to semantic category than in random presentations. In addition, a semantic interference effect is expected. The results of semantic blocking were consistent with these predictions and lend support to the failure of inhibition hypothesis.     

Frequency,not age of acquisition,affects Italian word naming

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the claim that age of acquisition (AoA) and word frequency effects are reduced or nonexistent in languages that have very regular letter-to-sound mappings, like Italian. The first two experiments (Exp. 1, Exp. 2) showed that frequency variables affect reading aloud and lexical decision in Italian. Variables interpretable as pertaining to a semantic component, including AoA, affected lexical decision but not reading aloud. In Experiments 3 and 4, a measure of frequency—child written word frequency (ChFreq)—and AoA were manipulated. Reading performance was affected by word frequency but not by AoA (Exp. 3), whereas lexical decision was affected by both variables (Exp. 4). In Experiments 5 and 6, ChFreq and AoA were manipulated orthogonally. Only frequency affected reading aloud, with no main effect or interaction involving AoA (Exp. 5). The effects of AoA and frequency interacted in Experiment 6 for lexical decision due to a larger effect of AoA for low frequency words than high frequency words. These results show that in languages with a transparent orthography word frequency may affect reading aloud in the absence of an effect of AoA because Italian readers employ lexical nonsemantic reading aloud. The effect of child written frequency points to the efficiency of the mappings between those orthographic and phonological word forms that were frequently encountered when learning to read.     

A pilot investigation into unimpaired and dyslexic Persian children's word naming and spelling: Implications for models of reading and counselling

There is now a growing body of research examining developmental dyslexia in different languages and writing systems. The phonologically transparent Persian orthography is normally transcribed with two distinct spellings, words spelled with vowels (letters) transcribed as a fixed part of the spelling (transparent) and words spelled with vowels (diacritics) omitted (opaque). This peculiarity of Persian would enable one to examine the impact of transparency, as well as the possible psychological factors associated with verbal punishment in Persian schools on the development of reading and spelling. Twenty-nine Persian children (22 male and 7 female) classified as being developmentally dyslexic (mean age 9.4, SD?=?1.4) were compared with 49 unimpaired male children (mean age 9, SD?=?1.3) on two main aspects of reading Persian opaque and transparent spellings, namely: Spelling and word naming. The results showed an expected impairment on all aspects of reading between unimpaired and children with dyslexia. However, performance of both groups of participants was impaired when performing tasks with opaque as opposed to transparent spellings. There was also a strong correlation between the recorded number of times the dyslexic child was verbally punished and the number of errors on the spelling and naming of transparent and opaque words. These results are supportive of the impact of spelling transparency, as well as psychological variables as factors in the development of reading and spelling.     

Effects of the lexical-semantic variables in visual word recognition

In languages with a deep orthography such as English, a number of studies have shown the effects of lexical and semantic variables on word recognition. In languages with a shallow orthography such as Spanish the regularity of the grapheme - phoneme correspondences may mean that lexical and semantic variables could have less relevant roles. In this study, three variables were tested: frequency, age of acquisition and imageability. These three variables were factorially manipulated in three lexical decision task and three word naming tasks. The results show that in lexical decision both frequency and age of acquisition influence reaction times but imageability was not significant. In the word reading task, only the age of acquisition had a significant effect. The implications of these results for models of reading in Spanish are discussed.     

Effects of orthographic transparency on reading and phoneme awareness in children learning to read in Wales

The relationship between the development of reading skills and the consistency of the orthography (writing system) is investigated in a study that examines reading acquisition in children living in Wales. Performance of children learning to read Welsh (a transparent alphabetic orthography) on tests of reading and phoneme detection was compared with the performance of children learning to read English (an opaque alphabetic orthography). The children were tested during their second year of formal reading instruction at school when they were aged between 5 and 6 years, and again one year later. The children learning to read in Welsh performed significantly better at reading both real words and nonwords than children learning to read in English. The English readers made fewer phonologically based reading errors. The Welsh readers also performed better on a phoneme awareness task. These findings support the claim that children learn to read more quickly in a transparent orthography, and provide further evidence that the consistency of the orthography influences the initial adoption of different strategies for word recognition.     

The role of age of acquisition in picture and word naming in dyslexic adults

To date, there has been numerous reports that early acquired pictures and words are named faster than late acquired pictures and words in normal reading but it is not established whether age of acquisition (AoA) has the same impact on adult dyslexic naming, especially in a transparent orthography such as Turkish. Independent ratings were obtained for AoA, frequency, name agreement, and object familiarity in Turkish for all items in the Snodgrass and Vanderwart line drawing set. Dyslexic (N= 15) and non-dyslexic (N= 15) university undergraduates were asked to name 30 early acquired and 30 late acquired pictures and picture names standardized and selected from these norms. As predicted, there were main effects for (a) AoA with reaction times (RTs) for Early items named faster than Late items, (b) reader status with non-dyslexic students faster than dyslexic students, and (c) stimuli types with pictures named slower than words. A two-way interaction between reader status and stimuli type was also significant. Implications of the results for theoretical frameworks of AoA within the cognitive architecture and normal and impaired models of reading are discussed.     

Attractor dynamics in word recognition: converging evidence from errors by normal subjects, dyslexic patients and a connectionist model

People make both semantic and visual errors when trying to recognise the meaning of degraded words. This result mirrors the finding that deep dyslexic patients make both semantic and visual errors when reading aloud. We link the results with the demonstration that a recurrent connectionist network which produces the meaning of words in response to their spelling pattern produces this distinctive combination of errors both when its input is degraded and when it is lesioned. The reason why the network can simulate the errors of both normal subjects and patients lies in the nature of the attractors which it develops as it learns to map orthography to semantics. The key role of attractor structure in the successful simulation suggests that the normal adult semantic reading route may involve attractor dynamics.