Anomia and dyslexia in Chinese: A familiar story?

Abstract

We report a study investigating the factors that predict the naming performance of four Chinese-speaking anomic patients. The results showed that the rated familiarity of an item predicts naming performance for all of the patients, a finding that is consistent with data from studies of English-speaking anomic patients. These data are discussed in terms of current models of spoken word production that have been developed largely on the basis of data from English speakers. We also investigated the relationship between anomia and dyslexia for each patient by presenting 232 items to name from pictorial input and from print. The results showed that there was a highly significant correlation between anomia and dyslexia for the same items among three of the four patients, a finding that is consistent with other studies of Chinese-speaking aphasic patients (e.g. Hu et al. 1983). However, for one patient there was a complete dissociation between naming and oral reading of the same items (impaired picture naming co-incident with flawless oral reading), suggesting that spoken word production and oral reading can proceed via separate cognitive systems. We offer a model of spoken word production and oral reading in Chinese that assumes picture naming and oral reading rely upon functionally separate pathways to account for these data.