Progressive Dyslexia: Evidence from Hungarian and English

Judit Druks,Marios Genethliou,Brendan Weekes,Jennifer Aydelott,Helen Jacobs

doi:10.1155/2012/702792

Abstract

We report a patient with non-fluent Primary Progressive Aphasia who was premorbidly literate in two alphabetic scripts, Hungarian (L1) and English (L2). Testing was performed over a two-year period to assess the impact of progressive illness on oral reading and repetition of single words. Results showed significant decline in oral reading in both languages, and an effect of language status in favour of oral reading in L1. Phonological complexity was a significant predictor of oral reading decline in both languages. Of interest, we observed an effect of language status on task performance whereby repetition was better in L2 than L1 but oral reading was better in L1 than L2. We conclude that language status has an effect on repetition and oral reading abilities for bilingual speakers with non-fluent Primary Progressive Aphasia.

Highlights

Studies of bilingual speakers who have acquired dyslexia in more than one language are an important source of data to test models of oral reading and written word recognition [13,21]
The opposite was true of oral reading scores, Hungarian being better than English χ2(1) = 4.51, p = 0.03
The results reveal two novel effects on oral reading performance in a bilingual patient with a progressive illness: a main effect of language status with reading better in Hungarian (L1) than English (L2) and a main effect of time with oral reading more impaired at T2 compared with T1

Summary

Introduction

Studies of bilingual speakers who have acquired dyslexia in more than one language are an important source of data to test models of oral reading and written word recognition [13,21]. Coltheart, Masterson, Prior and Ridoch [3] reported acquired dyslexia in a patient who premorbidly read in English and Nepalese – a syllabic Devanagari script with no orthographic similarity to English. The patient could read aloud words written in Devanagari if he could respond in English (see [11]). Raman and Weekes [16,22] reported a similar phenomenon in a Turkish (L1)/English (L2) speaker BRB who could produce the definitions of English printed homophones by responding in Turkish only (see [2])

Results

Discussion

Conclusion