Phonological deficit and the reliance on orthographic approximation for reading: a follow‐up study on an English‐Japanese bilingual with monolingual dyslexia

Abstract

A follow‐up study was conducted on AS, previously reported as an English‐Japanese bilingual with monolingual phonological dyslexia in English (Wydell and Butterworth, 1999). It was hypothesised that AS's fundamental deficit which lead to his dyslexia in English would still persist despite him successfully taking a BSc course in an English‐speaking country. AS and his Japanese and English control participants were asked to read aloud a target stimulus first, and then to decide whether the target was a word or nonword. Unlike the control participants, AS showed a marked dissociation between his performance in the lexical (orthographic and phonological) decision and the word naming tasks. Often those words and pseudo‐homophones (e.g. neym), which AS read erroneously, were correct in the decision tasks – the target pseudo‐homophone or word was substituted by another orthographically similar word. The results thus demonstrated that his reading of unfamiliar words or nonwords is essentially based on orthographic approximation using the visual similarities between words. The results confirmed the earlier finding that AS has a core phonological deficit which led to his dyslexia but never affected his reading in Japanese. The results also confirmed that this deficit persists when reading in English. This implies that whatever the neurological abnormality that AS may have, this only affects certain languages, and this abnormality persists with time.