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Abstract
This study reports the reading of 11 Arabic-speaking individuals with letter position dyslexia (LPD), and the effect of letter form on their reading errors. LPD is a peripheral dyslexia caused by a selective deficit to letter position encoding in the orthographic-visual analyzer, which results in migration of letters within words, primarily of middle letters. The Arabic orthography is especially interesting for the study of LPD because Arabic letters have different forms in different positions in the word. As a result, some letter position errors require letter form change. We compared the rate of letter migrations that change letter form with migrations that do not change letter form in 10 Arabic-speaking individuals with developmental LPD, and one bilingual Arabic and Hebrew-speaking individual with acquired LPD. The results indicated that the participants made 40% letter position errors in migratable words when the resulting word included the letters in the same form, whereas migrations that changed letter form almost never occurred. The error rate of the Arabic-Hebrew bilingual reader was smaller in Arabic than in Hebrew. However, when only words in which migrations do not change letter form were counted, the rate was similar in Arabic and Hebrew. Hence, whereas orthographies with multiple letter forms for each letter might seem more difficult in some respects, these orthographies are in fact easier to read in some forms of dyslexia. Thus, the diagnosis of LPD in Arabic should consider the effect of letter forms on migration errors, and use only migratable words that do not require letter-form change. The theoretical implications for the reading model are that letter form (of the position-dependent type found in Arabic) is part of the information encoded in the abstract letter identity, and thus affects further word recognition processes, and that there might be a pre-lexical graphemic buffer in which the checking of orthographic well-formedness takes place.
Highlights
The same exact dyslexia can manifest itself differently in different orthographies
IM had the same deficit in the two languages, with a tendency to make letter position errors in approximately a quarter of the words, letter-form in Arabic significantly reduced his general error rate, and blocked errors in words in which letter position errors cause letter form change
This study demonstrated, for the first time, letter position dyslexia in Arabic, in both developmental and acquired forms
Summary
The same exact dyslexia can manifest itself differently in different orthographies. For example, surface dyslexia is less pronounced in languages with a shallow orthography than in languages with a deep orthography; neglect dyslexia, which often affects the left side of words, causes letter omission, substitution, and addition on the beginning of words in English and Italian, but on the end of words in Hebrew, which is written from right to left. Letter position dyslexia (LPD) is a deficit in the orthographic-visual analysis system that selectively impairs the ability to encode the relative position of letters within words and causes letter position errors such as reading “form” instead of “from”. LPD is more detectible and causes more errors in languages like Hebrew, in which middle letter transpositions frequently create other existing words. This high probability of lexical transposition in Hebrew relates to the Semitic morphology, which creates many word pairs that differ in the relative order of its three root letters, or in the position of a middle morphological letter. The lexicality of transpositions relates to the underspecification of vowels, which creates many degrees of freedom in reading the letter sequence that results from the transposition, increasing the probability of migration creating an existing word
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