Acquired Dyslexia and Dysgraphia in Chinese

Abstract

Understanding how the mappings between orthography and phonology in alphabetic languages are learned, represented and processed has been enhanced by the cognitive neuropsychological investigation of patients with acquired reading and writing disorders. During the past decade, this methodology has been extended to understanding reading and writing in Chinese leading to new insights about language processing, dyslexia and dysgraphia. The aim of this paper is to review reports of patients who have acquired dyslexia and acquired dysgraphia in Chinese and describe the functional architecture of the reading and writing system. Our conclusion is that the unique features of Chinese script will determine the symptoms of acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia in Chinese.

Characteristics of dyslexia and dysgraphia in a Chinese patient with semantic dementia

“…His PPEs are similar, though not identical, to the pattern of surface dysgraphic errors produced by the phoneme to grapheme conversion rules when spelling irregular characters in SD patients who speak alphabetic languages. The appearance of orthographic output homophonic with the target in writing-to-dictation supports the Chinese cognitive framework mentioned above (Figure 1b), supporting the evidence that this type of error is associated with a preserved lexically mediated nonsemantic pathway (Law & Leung, 2000;Law & Or, 2001;Yin et al, 2005). With impairment in the lexicalsemantic pathway, there is not a sufficient constraint on the production of those homophonic responses.…”

“…Weekes presented a hypothesis that correct reading of low-familiarity, abstract Chinese characters requires support from semantic memory, and damage to the lexical-semantic pathway would result in LARC errors (Weekes & Chen, 1999). Through induction and summarizing previous literatures, Yin insisted that in the absence of sufficient semantic knowledge, more common pronunciations of components would dominate computation of phonology from orthography through the lexically mediated nonsemantic pathway (Yin et al, 2005). That is to say, it is plausible that when a component character is read, its pronunciation competes with the phonetic component.…”

“…There are four tone marks, "1" for the high tone, "2" for the rising tone, "3" for the falling-rising tone, and "4" for the falling tone. Unlike alphabetic scripts, where phonemes are associated with letters, some scholars hold no phoneme corresponds to any target grapheme (Law & Or, 2001;Siok, Perfetti, Jin, & Tan, 2004;Weekes, Chen, & Gang, 1997;Yin, He, & Weekes, 2005). In other words, the visual-sound-correspondence that resembles the grapheme to phoneme conversion (GPC) used in alphabetic scripts doesn't exist in Putonghua, though some scholars may disagree with this assertion.…”

“…Although Guo and Zhang mentioned impaired reading in Chinese SD patients, yet a detailed study has not been reported (Guo, Hong, Fu, Yu, & Lu, 2003;Zhang et al, 2008). It has been suggested that the reading in Chinese always relies on the lexical route because there is no GPC rule (Law & Or, 2001;Law, Wong, & Chiu, 2005;Weekes et al, 1997;Yin et al, 2005). Weekes hypothesized a lexical processing model for normal oral reading of Chinese script from print to phonological output.…”

“…Fushimi reported that a Japanese SD patient suffered from selective impairment in spelling with morphographic kanji characters, but intact dictation of phonographic kana characters (Fushimi et al, 2003). Some Chinese researchers proposed that with no phonology to orthography conversion (POC) correspondence, the model shown in Figure 1b can explain writing-to-dictation via a semantic and a lexically mediated nonsemantic pathway, if the mapping between orthography and phonology is supposed to be bidirectional (Law & Or, 2001;Reich, Chou, & Patterson, 2003;Yin et al, 2005). Theoretically, a damaged nonsemantic pathway cannot inhibit the semantically related writing responses generated by the lexical-semantic pathway, and a damaged lexical-semantic pathway cannot inhibit the phonologically plausible responses (i.e., homophonic) generated by the nonsemantic pathway.…”