A Case Study of Acquired Dyslexia and Dysgraphia in Cantonese: Evidence for Nonsemantic Pathways for Reading and Writing Chinese

Abstract

We report a Cantonese-speaking brain-damaged patient, CML, who demonstrates better oral reading than oral naming and better writing to dictation than written naming. Such dissociations are taken as evidence for nonsemantic routes for the production of spoken and written Chinese words. The occurrence of tonal errors in CML's reading aloud informs us about the structure of phonological representations. We propose that it is a nonlinear structure, similar to that which has been proposed in tonal phonology of Chinese. Specific impairment to these representations may lead to a dissociation between segmental and suprasegmental information. Finally, the similarity of CML's neologistic responses in oral and written naming, and her production of tonal errors in writing to dictation and written naming, favour the mediated version of the nonsemantic pathway for writing more than the unmediated pathway.