Investigation of the mechanism underlying kanji non-word reading deficit in a case of acquired phonological dyslexia

Abstract

I reported a patient with acquired phonological dyslexia who showed phonological processing deficit. I analyzed the consistency effect in reading aloud of kanji non-words to examine the mechanism of his kanji non-word reading disorder. He showed poorest performance with inconsistent atypical non-words composed of low-frequency kanji. Furthermore, lexicalization errors which were orthographically similar to kanji non-word stimuli appeared more frequently in kanji non-words that in non-words composed of high-frequency kanji. These results suggested that the patient's kanji non-word reading disorder was likely due to impairment of the character-to-sound conversion system. In other words, his impairment of character-to-sound conversion rules may cause him to have difficulty in reading kanji non-words that have ambiguous correspondence between character and sound. This outcome suggests that the consistency of reading influences accuracy of reading aloud of kanji non-words.