2019 Volume 39 Issue 1 Pages 28-35
We reported two Japanese patients with phonological dyslexia. In both patients, reading with a magnifying glass improved performance of a reading aloud task of Kana non-words, and enabled the patients to feel facility at reading sentences. On the reading aloud task of Kana non-words, both patients scored significantly better when they used a magnifying glass than when reading without one. We consider the mechanism of the effect as follows: Reading with a magnifying glass generates a mental set to focus on and read letters one by one on the reading aloud task. In both patients, the mental set may partially compensate for the fragility of phonological representation and impaired processing of phonological sequencing, and reduce misreading of Kana non-words. Use of a magnifying glass may reduce misreading of general sentences as well as non-words in Japanese patients with phonological dyslexia because of the agglutinative nature of the Japanese language.
