Progressive aphasia and surface Alexia in Japanese

Abstract We report the reading performance of a patient, NK, with selective left-temporal atrophy and progressive aphasia. NK showed surface alexlc reading with the following pattern: flawless oral reading of kana words; a deficit in reading of two-character kanji words that was particularly severe for lower frequency words with an unpredictable correspondence between the component characters and their pronunciations; a predominance of kanji-word reading errors In which characters were assigned pronunciations appropriate to other words containing these characters. These features were predicted and are interpreted on the basis of (a) recent studies of patients with progressive aphasia in English, (b) recent analyses of surface alexia in terms of an interaction between word frequency and neighbourhood-based consistency of spelling-sound correspondences, and (c) characteristics of the Japanese kana and kanji writing systems.

[1]  J. Marshall,et al.  Patterns of paralexia: A psycholinguistic approach , 1973 .

[2]  M. Mesulam,et al.  Slowly progressive aphasia without generalized dementia , 1982, Annals of neurology.

[3]  Rosaleen A. McCarthy,et al.  Reading without Semantics , 1983 .

[4]  S. Sasanuma,et al.  Universal and language-specific symptomatology and treatment of aphasia. , 1986, Folia phoniatrica.

[5]  E. Warrington,et al.  Phonological Reading: Phenomena and Paradoxes , 1986, Cortex.

[6]  Kazuhiko Yokosawa,et al.  Processes In Human Kanji-word Recognition , 1988, Proceedings of the 1988 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.

[7]  Sally Byng,et al.  A treatment for surface dyslexia , 1989 .

[8]  James L. McClelland,et al.  A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming. , 1989, Psychological review.

[9]  D. Neary,et al.  Semantic dementia: a form of circumscribed cerebral atrophy , 1995 .

[10]  Alfonso Caramazza,et al.  Mechanisms for accessing lexical representations for output: Evidence from a category-specific semantic deficit , 1991, Brain and Language.

[11]  B. Butterworth,et al.  The universality of two routines for reading: evidence from Chinese dyslexia , 1991, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[12]  Susan Robinson,et al.  Dissociation of mechanisms of reading in Alzheimer's disease , 1992, Brain and Language.

[13]  J. Hodges,et al.  Deterioration of word meaning: Implications for reading , 1992, Neuropsychologia.

[14]  Sumiko Sasanuma,et al.  Reading kanji without semantics: Evidence from a longitudinal study of dementia , 1992 .

[15]  H. Diesfeldt.  Impaired and preserved semantic memory functions in dementia , 1992 .

[16]  M. Behrmann,et al.  Surface dyslexia and dysgraphia: dual routes, single lexicon , 1992 .

[17]  J. Hodges,et al.  Semantic dementia. Progressive fluent aphasia with temporal lobe atrophy. , 1992 .

[18]  G. Humphreys,et al.  Phonologically mediated access to meaning for Kanji: Is a rows still a rose in Japanese Kanji? , 1993 .

[19]  A. Parkin,et al.  Progressive Aphasia without Dementia: A Clinical and Cognitive Neuropsychological Analysis , 1993, Brain and Language.

[20]  G. C. Orden,et al.  Interdependence of form and function in cognitive systems explains perception of printed words. , 1994, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[21]  H. Coslett,et al.  Reversal of the concreteness effect in a patient with semantic dementia , 1994 .

[22]  J. Hodges,et al.  Reading in dementia of the Alzheimer type: A preserved ability? , 1994 .

[23]  J. Hodges,et al.  The relationship between comprehension and oral reading in progressive fluent aphasia , 1994, Neuropsychologia.

[24]  Brian Butterworth,et al.  The inconsistency of consistency effects in reading: the case of Japanese kanji phonology , 1994, ICSLP.

[25]  Mark S. Seidenberg,et al.  Semantic effects in single-word naming. , 1995, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[26]  Elizabeth K. Warrington,et al.  Semantic memory and reading abilities: a case report. , 1995 .

[27]  Surface Dyslexia and Dysgraphia: How Are They Manifested in Japanese? , 1995 .

[28]  James L. McClelland,et al.  Understanding normal and impaired word reading: computational principles in quasi-regular domains. , 1996, Psychological review.

[29]  E. Funnell,et al.  Response Biases in Oral Reading: An Account of the Co occurrence of Surface Dyslexia and Semantic Dementia , 1996, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.