Too harts, won sole: Using dysgraphia treatment to address homophone representation

ABSTRACT

Previous spoken homophone treatment in aphasia found generalization to untreated homophones and interpreted this as evidence for shared phonological word form representations. Previous written treatment of non-homophones has attributed generalization to orthographic neighbours of treated items to feedback from graphemes to similarly spelled orthographic word forms. This feedback mechanism offers an alternative explanation for generalization found in treatment of spoken homophones. The aim of this study was to investigate the mechanism underpinning generalization (if any) from treatment of written homophones. To investigate this question a participant with acquired dysgraphia and impaired access to orthographic output representations undertook written spelling treatment. Generalization to untreated items with varying degrees of orthographic overlap was investigated. Three experimental sets included homographs (e.g., bank-bank), heterographs (e.g., sail-sale), and direct orthographic neighbours (e.g., bath-path). Treatment improved written picture naming of treated items. Generalization was limited to direct neighbours. Further investigation of generalization found that items with a greater number of close neighbours in the treated set showed greater generalization. This suggests that feedback from graphemes to orthographic word forms is the driving force of generalization. The lack of homograph generalization suggests homographs do not share a representation in the orthographic lexicon.

KEYWORDS:

• Homophone
• Language production
• Spelling
• Treatment
• Dysgraphia

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank CWS for his participation in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For example, when scoring KNIFE spelled as neafh the E has migrated from fifth position to the second, so it was scored 0.5. When dealing with multiple errors in a single response, following Buchwald and Rapp (2009) and Krajenbrink et al. (2017), the “visible” transformation is scored:, we did not assume migration of substituted letters, nor penalise the same position twice. For example, spelling WORD as whod, was scored by penalising the addition of H between W and O (i.e., 0.5 score for W and the O) and deletion of R (0 points for R). We would NOT, for example, assume that O and R transpose (0.75 points each), and the R is also replaced with H (reducing the 0.75 score to 0) as there is no way of knowing this. Instead only what is seen (that O has moved and there is an additional H) is scored.

2 We had controlled for the effect of orthographic neighbourhood by including a high and low orthographic control set. However, this did not consider orthographic neighbourhood within our set of treated items.

3 Gvion, Biran, Sharabi, and Gil (2015) conducted a phonological homophone treatment with a bilingual participant, however, as this participant suffered from phonological output buffer impairment (not phonological word form impairment), homophone generalisation was not predicted. In fact, no treatment effects at all were found in this individual. Therefore, this particular case is uninformative in terms of homophone representations and whether being bilingual can influence homophone representation and generalisation.

Additional information

Funding

During the preparation of this paper, LN was funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship [FT120100102 (2012-2018) and PB was funded by Macquarie University's international HDR scholarship].