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

Abstract

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.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to YKM for his participation in this study. This work was supported by a grant (HKU 7157/02H) from the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong.

Notes

Phonetic transcriptions are given in jyutping, a romanisation system developed by the Linguistics Society of Hong Kong. The tone of a syllable is represented by the number in the transcription.

The direct route was proposed to account for cases where patients with semantic impairment could read aloud exception words without regularization errors but failed to read nonwords (e.g., Schwartz et al. 1979; Newcombe and Marshall, 1981). However, the postulation of such a pathway has been challenged by Hillis & Caramazza (1991).

This constraint is necessary because of extensive compounding in the language.

Although the normative data on the Stroop Test and the two memory tests are based on much younger subjects, no more than 46 years of age, YKM’s levels of performance on these tasks were so low that it is improbable that they are comparable to normal performance of his age group.

We thank the anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to this issue.