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Thursday stream 4-6 Session 11.35 - 12.50 Length 25 minutes
Alice Cheng Lai. and Xiangzhi Meng
(1) Department of Nursing and Health Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China (2) Department of Psychology, Beijing University, Beijing, China hsalai@inet.polyu.edu.hk
Abstract
There is now strong evidence that the prevalence of developmental dyslexia in different orthographies is equivalent, but the type and characteristic of developmental dyslexia in different orthographic writing systems might be varied and needs to be explored. Chinese is a deep orthography whose correspondence between orthography, phonology and semantics is relatively arbitrary compared to an alphabetic writing system. It will be worthy to examine the expression and features of Chinese developmental dyslexia. This study presents a detailed investigation of a 9 years old Chinese dyslexic boy who is in the fourth grade. His intelligence is normal, but his Chinese language, especially character recognition lags behind his chronological age. We examined his memory ability which indicated his response was in the normal range. In a series of character recognition and reading tasks, he made many homophone and visual errors, all of which suggested the connection between orthography, phonology and semantics was not well established. All the errors were sometimes semantically related to the original characters. In a defining character task, he often defined a character as its homophone, especially when the targets were low frequency characters, in which case he usually defined them as high frequency homophones. In a naming task , his naming latency was much longer than that of controls, which indicated his lexical access was much slower. The main errors he made suggest that he suffers from a semantic processing deficit, perhaps a manifestation of the Chinese writing system and the characteristics of Chinese developmental dyslexia. We therefore gave him a set of semantic processing tasks, including defining oral words, homophone selection and morpheme explanation, his responses were out of normal range compared with chronological and reading age controls. From this study, we argue that the mapping between orthography, phonology and semantics in Chinese characters and the lexicon differentiation may be a very important kind of difficulty to developmental dyslexic children, We discuss the data in relation to Chinese writing system and the theory of connection model.
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