Phonological Alexia in Japanese: A Case Study

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Abstract
A pattern of highly selective impairment in reading nonwords is described in a Japanese patient, TY, who achieved essentially normal performance on most of a range of other language abilities tested. Other prominent features of TY's reading were: (1) almost flawless reading of all types of familiar words in both kanji and kana; (2) differential performance, both quantitative and qualitative, on three types of nonwords constructed by altering real words in various ways; (3) dramatic improvement in pronunciation of orthographic nonwords with phonologically familiar pronunciations (pseudohomophones); and (4) from near-normal to impaired performance on different types of mora-based phonological manipulation tasks. With reference to the so-called “triangle” framework of reading (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989), these characteristics are interpreted to arise from an impaired phonological production system in which activation tends to fall into familiar patterns corresponding to real words. An alternative account of TY's performance in terms of the recent dual-route cascaded model (Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993) is also discussed.

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