2003 Volume 23 Issue 2 Pages 138-148
Aphasic and dyslexic patterns were assessed in a 13-year-old patient with acquired childhood aphasia since age 12. Although her oral language improved early on for daily conversation, there remained difficulty in naming low-frequency words and repeating short sentences, as well as symptoms of dyslexia and dysgraphia. Her dyslexic patterns, at the early stage, demonstrated deep dyslexia characterized by semantic paralexias with imageability and lexicality effects in reading aloud. Even after subsequent recovery for Kana words and then Kana nonwords, a deficit for Kanji words was still observed. In the experimental task of reading aloud two-character Kanji words, she demonstrated impaired performance for words having low levels of familiarity, frequency, imageability and consistency. Although she also showed impaired reading more for ON-reading words than for KUN-reading words, imageability and consistency effects were observed in both ON- and KUN-reading words, indicating that both the indirect orthography-to-semantic-to-phonology pathway and the direct orthography-to-phonology pathway are employed in her reading aloud of Kanji words. One interpretation of these dyslexic patterns is that both the indirect and direct pathways function imperfectly, as indicated in the imageability and consistency (and also ON/KUN) effects, respectively. An alternative explanation is that her dyslexic and also aphasic symptoms might arise from phonological impairment ; this is suggested on the basis of preserved comprehension and impaired performance in non-reading phonological tasks such as nonword repetitions.
