Surface dyslexia in Chinese

Abstract

We report the oral reading performance of a Chinese anomic patient LJG, whose reduced confrontation naming was accompanied by impaired written word and spoken word comprehension. LJG's oral reading is significantly better than his comprehension of the same lexical items from written word and from spoken word input, although his oral reading is not flawless. We examined the effects of character regularity, frequency and concreteness on LJG's oral reading of single-character monosyllabic Chinese words. LJG displayed impairment when reading aloud irregular Chinese characters that have an unpredictable correspondence between their components and the pronunciation of the character as a whole. This deficit was particularly severe for irregular, low-frequency, abstract items. In addition, LJG produced a number of oral reading errors in which characters were assigned pronunciations appropriate to a character component rather than the character itself. We characterize LJG's oral reading as surface dyslexia. We argue that the oral reading of irregular Chinese characters is more prone to error than oral reading of regular Chinese characters following brain damage because of response competition at the level of phonological output.