Surface dyslexia and visual word recognition in Japanese

Abstract

    We reported three cases of surface dyslexia in Japanese. Case 1 was a patient with Alzheimer-type dementia and Cases 2 and 3 were patients with semantic dementia. All subjects were able to read well both words composed of two to eight kana characters and nonwords composed of three to five kana characters, but could not read words composed of two or three kanji characters without a prevailing tendency to substitute other (more typical) pronunciations of the component characters. Cases 2 and 3 (typical surface dyslexia) exhibited prominent consistency and familiarity (frequency) effects in reading kanji-words, as English cases have shown. However, they demonstrated a significant number of “don't know” responses, which might reflect characteristics of Japanese orthography.