Semantic errors in transcoding tasks in a shallow orthography: A retrospective study on 502 Italian vascular patients

Abstract

The defining feature of deep dyslexia, deep dysgraphia and deep dysphasia is production of semantic errors in reading aloud, writing to dictation and repetition. Single case studies of patients with these syndromes appear relatively frequently in the English literature. A question of interest is whether differences in the degree to which orthographies conform to the alphabetic principle are reflected in differences in the process of reading. The orthographic depth hypothesis proposes that phonological representations will mediate between print and lexicon more efficiently the more shallow or transparent the orthography is. This seems to suggest that in brain-damaged patients semantic errors in reading (and writing) should be less frequent in shallow orthographies, such as Italian, than in deeper ones. In this retrospective study, the frequency of occurrence of verbal and semantic paraphasias was studied in 502 right-handed vascular Italian patients with a single CT lesion limited to the left hemisphere. Patients had been given a Standard Language Examination for aphasia which comprises repetition, reading aloud and writing to dictation of nonwords and words. Twenty-four patients had one or more verbal paraphasias in single word processing tasks. Only a small subset of these were semantic and paraphasias were few in each patient.