A morphological analysis of object naming and reading errors by a Cantonese dyslexic patient

Abstract

This paper describes the spoken error production of a Cantonese-speaking brain-injured patient. His intact lexical comprehension, comparably impaired performance on and the occurrence of semantic errors in reading and naming, and the absence of legitimate alternative reading of components (LARC errors) constitute evidence for deficits to the direct reading route and to phonological processes of the semantic pathway. A morphological analysis of his spoken errors reveals a preponderance of errors sharing a morpheme with their target, the presence of association errors, and a tendency to produce verb responses to nominal stimuli. Current psycholinguistic models of the Chinese lexicon assuming whole-word representations only at the semantic level successfully account for the production of morphologically similar and association errors, while other aspects of his error pattern raise the issue of the specification of lexico-syntactic information in the lexicon.