Preserved reading aloud with semantic deficits: Evidence for a non-semantic lexical route for reading Chinese

This article describes a Cantonese dyslexic patient with a dissociation between reading ability and oral naming, similar to previously reported cases of Chinese dyslexia. Additional semantic tests without pictorial input were given to localize his impairment to the semantic system. His largely preserved reading performance vis-à-vis semantic deficits, together with the absence of assembled phonology in Chinese, support a model of the Chinese lexicon in which reading can be achieved via two different lexical routes, one with semantic mediation and one without. The patient's poor ability to make homophony judgments of written characters and the high rate of tonal errors suggest that brain injury may have a more detrimental effect on suprasegmental than segmental features of phonological representations. Copyright © Taylor & Francis Inc.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

A case report of a Cantonese surface dyslexic patient: Further evidence for a dual-route model of reading Chinese

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Whole-word phonological representations of disyllabic words in the Chinese lexicon: data from acquired dyslexia

This study addresses the issue of the existence of whole-word phonological representations of disyllabic and multisyllabic words in the Chinese mental lexicon. A Cantonese brain-injured dyslexic individual with semantic deficits, YKM, was assessed on his abilities to read aloud and to comprehend disyllabic words containing homographic heterophonous characters, the pronunciation of which can only be disambiguated in word context. Superior performance on reading to comprehension was found. YKM could produce the target phonological forms without understanding the words. The dissociation is taken as evidence for whole-word representations for these words at the phonological level. The claim is consistent with previous account for discrepancy of the frequencies of tonal errors between reading aloud and object naming in Cantonese reported of another case study of similar deficits. Theoretical arguments for whole-word form representations for all multisyllabic Chinese words are also discussed. © 2005 - IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Treatment for anomia in Chinese using an ortho-phonological cueing method

Background: Anomia therapies can be broadly categorised into semantically based and word-form based. Comparable treatment outcomes of these different approaches have been reported. Law, Wong, Sung, and Hon (2006a) have recently applied semantic feature analysis (Boyle & Coelho, 1995) on three Chinese anomic speakers and found treatment progress limited to those with relatively mild semantic deficits. Hence the present study explored alternative approaches to manage naming problems. Despite the challenges to the use of cueing that stem from the characteristics of the Chinese script - i.e., the lack of mapping between sub-character components and phonemes - an intervention was designed in which participants were trained to associate objects with letters representing the initial consonants of the target names, from which phonological cues were generated to assist in word retrieval. Aims: This study evaluated the effectiveness of an ortho-phonological therapy for Chinese anomia. Given its function of strengthening semantic and phonological representations, the therapy was predicted to have item-specific treatment effects. Methods & Procedures: Four Cantonese-speaking anomic individuals participated in the study. Two were hypothesised to have disrupted access from semantics to phonology, whereas the other two suffer additional impairment to semantic processing and phonological output. A multiple baseline design was adopted, consisting of pre-treatment training in which participants learned to generate CV syllables in response to letter cues, then a baseline, one or two treatment phases, and a maintenance phase. A cueing hierarchy was used during therapy, which began with a letter cue, followed by the provision of increasing phonological information if the participant continuously failed to retrieve the target name. Outcomes & Results: All participants benefited from the intervention and could maintain treatment gains for at least 1 month. Item-specific improvement was observed for two participants, whereas the third patient also made progress on some of the untrained items that shared the same initials as the treated stimuli, and treatment generalisation of the fourth patient further extended to items with initial consonants different from the trained items. Different levels of facility in employing letter-sound correspondence during naming and executive problem-solving skills were argued to have contributed to discrepant treatment outcomes. Conclusions: The ortho-phonological therapy is a viable option for rehabilitating anomia in Chinese. It has the potential for being a naming strategy that may result in general improvement in word retrieval. Our findings echo the view in recent studies that urges investigation into the role of non-linguistic cognitive abilities in predicting treatment outcomes.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Processing of semantic radicals in writing Chinese characters: Data from a Chinese dysgraphic patient

This paper describes a case study of a Chinese brain-injured patient with mild dyslexia and more severe dysgraphia. The distributions of his reading and writing errors across tasks are consistent with previous reports. Semantic errors predominated in naming tasks in both modalities, while the preponderance of LARC or phonologically similar errors in reading and phonologically plausible errors in writing-to-dictation was found. Furthermore, his writing errors showed that the semantic radical could be replaced, omitted, or added, whereas only substitutions or deletions of the phonetic radical were observed. The finding that had not been reported before was the existence of a semantic relationship between the substituting or inserted semantic radicals and their target word in many non-character responses. This was taken as evidence for models of the mental lexicon where orthographic units of different sizes are arranged at the same level and semantic radicals are directly connected with semantic features. © 2005 Psychology Press Ltd.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Short Term Effects Of 5hz Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rtms) On Swallowing And Speech Functions In Post-stroke Individuals

Poster session H: Dysphagia in stroke and brain damag

Motor Evoked Potentials (MEPs) Of The Tongue In Healthy Adults And Dysphagic Individuals

Poster session D: Physiology and neurophysiolog