Are acronyms really irregular? Preserved acronym reading in a case of semantic dementia

Abstract

This paper describes the progressive performance of JD, a patient with semantic dementia, on acronym categorisation, recognition and reading aloud over a period of 18 months. Most acronyms have orthographic and phonological configurations that are different from English words (BBC, DVD, HIV). While some acronyms, the majority, are regularly pronounced letter by letter, others are pronounced in a more holistic, and irregular, way (NASA, AWOL). Semantic dementia at its moderate stage shows deficits in irregular word reading while reading accuracy for regular words and novel words is preserved. Nothing is known about acronym comprehension and reading ability in semantic dementia. Thus, in this study we explore for the first time the impact that semantic decline has on acronym recognition and reading processes. The decline in JD's semantic system led to increasingly impaired semantic categorisation and lexical decision for acronyms relative to healthy controls. However, her accuracy for reading aloud regular acronyms (i.e. those pronounced letter by letter such as BBC) remained near ceiling while reading irregular acronyms (i.e. those pronounced as mainstream words such as NASA) demonstrated impairment. It is therefore argued that consequences of semantic impairment vary across acronym types, a finding that informs our understanding of any reading account of this growing class of words.Dear Editor-in-Chief, Please find enclosed our revised manuscript, "Are acronyms really irregular? Preserved acronym reading in a case of semantic dementia" by David Playfoot, Cristina Izura and Jeremy Tree, which we would like to resubmit for publication in Neuropsychologia.We appreciate the time that the reviewers have spent considering our work, and have addressed the issues that they had raised in our resubmission. We thank them for their helpful comments and believe that the paper is stronger for their input. Below we detail our response to each individual comment. The material that we have added is indicated in bold in the manuscript to make it easier for the reviewers to see what we have done. All authors have approved the revised manuscript and agree with its submission to Neuropsychologia. Please address all correspondence to: Dr David Playfoot, Department of Psychology, Southampton Solent University, Above Bar Street, Southampton, SO14 7NN.We look forward to hearing from you at the earliest possible convenience. For instance, an interesting finding of the authors is that as soon as the orthographic rules are violated in a number of words, the patient seems to rely on the letter-by-letter rule, even for words that could be read differently. Indeed, the case could be made that this is the easiest way of pronouncing letter sequences. There is some evidence that acronyms are stored phonologically as sequences of letter names (Brysbaert, Slattery). Response:As recommended by Reviewer 1, Marc Brysbaert, a more precise view and therefore definition of regular/ irregular acronyms is provided in the last paragraph of page 5...

Naming acronyms: The influence of reading context in skilled reading and surface dyslexia

“…The authors suggested that the fact that the vast majority of the items to be read required a letter by letter pronunciation meant that participants found it particularly difficult to respond when they encountered a stimulus which needed an alternative spelling to sound conversion. Playfoot et al, (2013) also found context effects in JD, a surface dyslexia patient. For example, when she was presented with a mixed list containing both words and acronyms, JD pronounced the vast majority of the items one letter at a time, irrespective of their type.…”

“…However, while there is considerable evidence to suggest that familiar acronyms do have phonological representations in the lexicon much as words do (Brysbaert et al, 2009;Slattery et al, 2006) our recent work has indicated that these representations do not necessarily need to be accessed for a correct pronunciation to be reached (Izura & Playfoot, 2012;Playfoot, Izura & Tree, 2013). Instead, we have argued that acronym naming can be achieved through the application of a single sub-lexical rule.…”

“…Interestingly, some evidence of context effects with acronyms was observed in the data reported in both Izura and Playfoot (2012) and Playfoot et al (2013). Izura and Playfoot (2012) reported that, presented with a list containing only acronyms, undergraduate participants named ambiguous atypical acronyms (e.g.…”

“…Further evidence for the existence of a sublexical rule for reading acronyms has been provided by the examination of acronym processing in acquired dyslexia. Playfoot et al (2013) described JD, a patient with semantic dementia. An archetypal feature of semantic dementia is surface dyslexia (Hodges, Patterson, Oxbury & Funnell, 1992;Coltheart, Saunders & Tree, 2010) which describes a deficit in reading irregular words while regular word reading is preserved.…”

“…It seems unlikely that a deficit in the lexical route would preserve representations for acronyms when words of a similar frequency had been lost. Thus, Playfoot et al (2013) argued that JD's successful reading of typical acronyms was underpinned by a rule based mechanism, either as a separate reading route or as integrated somehow in the grapheme -phoneme conversion route. These are important findings, because they indicate that some acronyms at least (particularly those pronounced a letter at a time) could be successfully read using two different processes.…”