Like other Semitic languages, Arabic is known for its rich morphology and consonantal writing system. In this article, we report the first case of acquired surface dyslexia in an Arabic-speaking patient (HBS). Surface dyslexia is characterised by difficulty reading irregularly spelled words, while performance is better with regular words and nonwords. The purpose of this study was to describe the symptoms of surface dyslexia in Arabic and to investigate how orthographic depth may affect reading in the context of semantic impairment. In HBS, who had Alzheimer's disease, reading was impaired for both words and nonwords. Her reading performance was affected by orthographic ambiguity and by the presence of diacritics depicting short vowels. In particular, she produced mainly vowel errors, suggesting an overreliance on the sublexical route of reading. On the other hand, HBS was able to distinguish long vowels from consonants represented by the same letters, provided there was a real root. This finding can be taken as evidence that HBS could access the word's root to decide whether the vowel letter represents a long vowel or a consonant. The results of this study suggest that the characteristics of surface dyslexia appear to be universal: reading regular words is spared compared to irregular words and non-words. However, the error patterns that HBS showed in reading support a language-specific conceptualisation of the processing components of the lexical and sublexical routes of reading.
Download full-text PDF |
Source |
|---|---|
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2023.2298993 | DOI Listing |
Publication Analysis
Top Keywords
Similar Publications
Primary Progressive Aphasia in Italian and English: A Cross-Linguistic Cohort Study.
Neurology
December 2024
From the Dementia Research Centre (S.M., C.J.D.H., J.J., E.B., J.C.S.J., A.C., J.D.R., J.D.W.), Department of Neurodegenerative Disease, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, United Kingdom; Research and Innovation Centre for Dementia-CRIDEM (S.M., C.M., V.M., S.P., S.S., V.B.), Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Careggi, Florence; Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (S.M.), Milan; IRCCS Policlinico San Donato (S.M.), San Donato Milanese, Italy; Division of Neurology (A.C.), Department of Internal Medicine, King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital, Thai Red Cross Society; Cognitive Clinical and Computational Neuroscience Research Unit (A.C.), Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand; University of Florence (G.G.), Italy; Department of Psychology & Language Sciences (A.V.), University College London, United Kingdom; Department of Neuroscience, Psychology, Drug Research and Child Health (A.I., S.B., B.N., S.S.), University of Florence, Azienda Ospedaliera-Universitaria Careggi; and IRCCS Fondazione Don Carlo Gnocchi (B.N., S.S., V.B.), Florence, Italy.
Article Synopsis
- This study investigates how language-specific features affect primary progressive aphasia (PPA) symptoms in Italian and English speakers, diverging from the traditionally English-focused research.
- A comparison was made between 106 Italian speakers and 166 English speakers with various PPA syndromes, highlighting differences in demographic factors and symptom profiles.
- Results showed significant variations between the cohorts, with English speakers having a higher proportion of nonfluent/agrammatic PPA cases and different patterns of language comprehension and production issues compared to Italian speakers.
Resolving the problem of surface dyslexia in Italian through inflection of irregular verbs.
J Neuropsychol
November 2024
Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Surface dyslexia and dysgraphia are considered diagnostic features of semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and are useful signs in English, a language whose attributes afford numerous opportunities to observe these phenomena. This, however, is not the case in many languages, including Italian, that have high transparency between orthography and phonology, making surface reading and spelling errors scarce. This creates a problem in applying the diagnostic recommendations for svPPA in such languages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMultiple Types of Developmental Dyslexias in a Shallow Orthography: Principles for Diagnostic Screening in Italian.
Brain Sci
July 2024
Language and Brain Lab, School of Education and Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yafo 6997801, Israel.
A new dyslexia screening test for Italian, , is presented. The test was developed based on an integrated dual-route model of reading, which describes in detail specific mechanisms underpinning early visual processes as well as the lexical and the sublexical routes. The principle according to which the test was developed is that each dyslexia type is manifested in different kinds of errors and in different kinds of stimuli, and we therefore included stimuli sensitive to each dyslexia type in the test.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPresentation matters: Surface text features and text quality in written narratives of Dutch high school students with and without dyslexia.
Dyslexia
November 2024
Research Institute of Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Presentation features such as spelling, punctuation and handwriting can influence the evaluation of general text quality. High school students with dyslexia might therefore be at a disadvantage, as at least their spelling performance is typically poor(er). Furthermore, these students might show less sophisticated linguistic features of texts, such as word length and sentence complexity, that might also be related to text quality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSimultaneous simulations of pure, surface and phonological acquired dyslexia within a full computational model of the primary systems hypothesis.
Cortex
October 2024
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, UK.
According to the primary systems hypothesis, reading requires interactions of visual-orthographic, phonological and semantic systems. Damage to each primary system generates very different types of acquired dyslexia. Variants of the connectionist 'triangle' models of reading have been developed to investigate individual acquired dyslexia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWant AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!