Hyphenation can improve reading in acquired phonological dyslexia

Parts of this paper were based on work reported by David A. O’Mara in his undergraduate thesis at the University of Dundee. We are indebted to Dr Allan Ward, GP, for his summary of JD’s medical history. Most of all, we are grateful to JD, who was always a most willing and cheerful participant. We thank Lynne Duncan, Nadine Martin, and Tim Shallice for their comments.

Abstract

Background: We describe JD, a person with severe phonological dyslexia. JD is good at reading words yet is extremely poor at reading nonwords. She shows no effect of word regularity on her reading performance. However, she has only a very mild general phonological deficit. Although it is known that teaching grapheme–phoneme correspondence rules and learning bigraph syllables can improve dyslexic reading, we investigate the possibility that segmenting the input string using hyphens can also improve reading.

Parts of this paper were based on work reported by David A. O’Mara in his undergraduate thesis at the University of Dundee. We are indebted to Dr Allan Ward, GP, for his summary of JD’s medical history. Most of all, we are grateful to JD, who was always a most willing and cheerful participant. We thank Lynne Duncan, Nadine Martin, and Tim Shallice for their comments.

Aims: We investigate the locus of JD's reading deficit and explore means of improving her reading. We examine the extent to which hyphenation can improve nonword reading.

Methods & Procedures: We use a battery of tasks in a single‐case study. We test oral reading, writing and spelling ability, and lexical and semantic knowledge. We assess phonological processing using tests of repetition and phonological awareness. We focus on blending and segmentation, and test whether hyphenating the letter string can improve reading.

Outcomes & Results: JD is very good at reading words (overall about 90%), but very poor at reading nonwords (overall about 10%). She makes no semantic errors and shows little effect of word regularity. JD has only a mild concomitant phonological deficit. She also has a very good digit span (8). JD can read affixes in isolation, and can also read nonwords made up of inappropriately affixed morphemes (e.g., “dismove”) if a hyphen is inserted at the affixation point (e.g., “dis‐move”). We found that hyphenation improves nonword reading in general, but particularly if it is the grapheme units that are separated by hyphens.

Conclusions: We discuss the possibility that JD's phonological dyslexia arises from impaired graphemic parsing, and that affixes have inherent meaning for her. Hyphenation may be a therapeutic tool worthy of wider consideration for improving reading performance in people with dyslexia.

Notes

Parts of this paper were based on work reported by David A. O’Mara in his undergraduate thesis at the University of Dundee. We are indebted to Dr Allan Ward, GP, for his summary of JD’s medical history. Most of all, we are grateful to JD, who was always a most willing and cheerful participant. We thank Lynne Duncan, Nadine Martin, and Tim Shallice for their comments.