Nonlexical Route Research Articles

Cognitive patterns and neural correlates in acquired phonological dyslexia. A pilot study in Greek patients after traumatic and non-traumatic brain disorders

Reading and writing difficulties are commonly observed after traumatic and non-traumatic brain disorders (T-nTBDs). In this study, we investigated whether: (a) differentiation between acquired dyslexia (AD) and aphasia is possible in patients with T-nTBDs; (b) AD patterns constitute the subtype of Acquired Phonological Dyslexia (APhD); and (c) there are causal interactions between brain lesions and the APhD phenotype. A total of 22 Greek patients with T-nTBDs receiving a six-month intensive speech treatment were recruited for the study. The Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) and the Dyslexia Adults Screening Test (DAST) were applied. The significant statistical correlations between the DAST tests of “Semantic Fluency” and “Nonsense Passage Reading” (p = .006), along with their statistically significant effect on the Dyslexia Quotient (p = .044, p = .020, respectively), highlighted the prevalence of the APhD type. A network of brain lesions was found to be significantly involved in rapid naming, reading, and working memory difficulties. Results indicated that in several patients with T-nTBDs diagnostic APhD patterns potentially different from those of aphasia have been circumscribed and construed by brain lesions involving different but interacting components of the non-lexical route. Such findings are primary as well as decisive for the effective rehabilitation of patients with T-nTBSs.

Visuo-Attentional and Phonological Deficits Explored in French Students with Dyslexia: Eye Movements Recorded during a Phonological Lexical Decision Task.

Whether dyslexia is caused by phonological or attentional dysfunction remains a widely debated issue. To enrich this debate, we compared the eye movements of 32 French university students with (14 students) and without (18 students) dyslexia while performing a delayed phonological lexical decision task on 300 visually presented stimuli. The processing stimuli involved either a lexical (i.e., words) or a non-lexical route relying on a grapheme-phoneme correspondence (pseudohomophones and pseudowords), while other stimuli involved only a visual search (consonant and symbol sequences). We recorded the number of fixations, the duration of the first fixation and the amplitude of saccades made on the stimuli. Compared to the controls, the participants with dyslexia made more fixations while reading regardless of the type of stimulus (lexical and non-lexical). Crucially, the participants with dyslexia exhibited longer first fixations in particular while reading phonologically challenging stimuli such as pseudohomophones and pseudowords compared to stimuli involving a simple visual search (consonants, symbols). Taken together, these results suggest that both visual and phonological impairments may be implicated in dyslexia, supporting the hypothesis that dyslexia is a multifactorial deficit.

Word Decoding Abilities of 1st Graders with Developmental Dyslexia Considering Reading Severity and Word and Syllable Structure

Objectives: This study investigated word decoding abilities of 1st graders with Developmental dyslexia according to the level of decoding difficulty, meaning availability, word and syllable structure.Methods: Twenty Korean 1st graders with developmental dyslexia participated in 40 word-reading tasks individually. All of them had severe decoding difficulties, even with normal listening comprehension (KORLA; Pae et al., 2015) and intelligence (K-CTONI-2; Park, 2014). The group differences by decoding difficulties were compared considering the meaning of words, the number of syllable-final graphemes, and the position of each grapheme in a syllable.Results: Both the severe and less-severe group in Korean word-decoding difficulties revealed the gaps between word reading and nonword reading. Both groups had decoding difficulties when a word had syllable-final graphemes, while the severe group had even lower performances in word readings with 2 syllable-final graphemes. Both groups showed similar performances in reading syllable-initial graphemes while the severe group had lower performances both in reading syllable-medial vowel graphemes and syllable-final consonant graphemes compared to the less-severe group.Conclusion: Korean 1st graders with developmental dyslexia seemed to be in urgent need of decoding support considering word and syllable structure. Triggering the non-lexical route with non-words considering the grain size of syllable-medial vowel graphemes and syllable-final graphemes would facilitate word decoding abilities of severely dyslexic Korean children.

Reading Development, Word Length and Frequency Effects: An Eye-Tracking Study with Slow and Fast Readers

Research on reading development attempts to explain differences in the reading patterns of adults and children. Previous studies, which typically analyzed word length and frequency effects in developing readers, often focused on dyslexic or dysfluent readers. Similar to previous studies, we investigated the effects of word length and word frequency on the eye movements of children and added several novel aspects: We tested 66 typically developing German-speaking children. Children’s oral reading fluency was used as measure of reading ability. Only fast readers (n = 34, mean age 10.9 ± 0.9 years) and slow readers (n = 32, 11.2 ± 0.9 years) participated in an eye-tracking experiment and silently read an age-appropriate original narrative text from a children’s book. The analysis of silent reading of the entire text confirmed the earlier group classification. To analyze word length and frequency, we selected 40 nouns as target words in the text. We found significant effects of word length and word frequency for all children in the expected direction. For fast readers, we detected significant interactions of word length and frequency in first fixation duration, gaze duration, and total reading time. These revealed a frequency effect for long, but not short words. This suggests lexical whole-word processing with a fast activation of the word’s lexical entry for shorter words and an application of the nonlexical route of the dual route cascaded model (DRC) with a slower lexical access to whole word forms for long words. Slow readers demonstrated a strong sensitivity to word length, indicating a slower or delayed lexical access to orthographic word forms. Additionally, they exhibited weaker word frequency effects. These findings suggest a developmental view of reading in typically developing children in accordance with the DRC, with nonlexical serial decoding as the seemingly prominent reading strategy of slow readers and lexical whole-word recognition as the prominent reading strategy of fast readers.

Developmental Letter Position Dyslexia in Turkish, a Morphologically Rich and Orthographically Transparent Language.

We present the first report of a specific type of developmental dyslexia in Turkish, letter position dyslexia (LPD). LPD affects the encoding of letter positions, leading to letter migrations within words. In a multiple case study of 24 Turkish-speaking children with developmental LPD, we examined in detail the characteristics of this dyslexia and explored its manifestation in Turkish. We used migratable words, in which a migration creates another existing word (e.g., signer-singer), which exposed the migration errors of the participants. In sharp contrast with the common assumption that dyslexics in transparent languages, including Turkish, do not make reading errors, we have shown that right stimuli can detect even up to 30% reading errors. The participants made migrations in reading aloud, comprehension, lexical decision, and same-different tasks, in both words and non-words. This indicates that their deficit is in the orthographic-visual analysis stage, a stage that precedes the orthographic input lexicon and is shared by the lexical and non-lexical routes. Their repetition of non-words and migratable words was normal, indicating that their phonological output stages are intact. They did not make digit migrations in reading numbers, indicating that the orthographic-visual analyzer deficit is orthographic-specific. The properties of Turkish allowed us to examine two issues that bear on the cognitive model of reading: consonant-consonant transpositions were far more frequent than consonant-vowel and vowel-vowel migrations. This indicates that the orthographic-visual analyzer already classifies letters into consonants and vowels, before or together with letter position encoding. Furthermore, Turkish is very rich morphologically, which has allowed us to examine the effect of the morphological structure of the target word on migrations. We found that there was no morphological effect on migrations: morphologically complex words did not yield more (nor fewer) migrations than monomorphemic ones, migrations crossed morpheme boundaries and did not preserve the morphological structure of the target word. This suggests that morphological analysis follows the letter-position encoding stage.

Word Reading in Boys With Isolated Oral Clefts: Comparison to Unaffected Average and Dyslexic Readers Using the Dual-Route Model.

To examine word reading performance between boys with isolated cleft lip and/or palate (iCL/P), unaffected average reading (uAR), and unaffected impaired reading (uIR), using the dual-route model. Case/control study. University children's hospital. Males, between the ages of 8 to 11 years, with iCL/P (n = 26), uIR (n = 33), or uAR (n = 28). Single word reading and achievement were evaluated. Analyses of variance and analyses of covariance evaluated group differences in achievement. Medical records were reviewed for iCL/P participants for audiology and speech history. Spearman ρ correlations were calculated between hearing, speech, and reading achievement for the iCL/P group. Reading performance was evaluated using select subscales from the Woodcock Johnson Reading Mastery Test, 3rd Edition and the Test of Orthographic Competence. Participants with iCL/P had higher than expected rates of reading impairment, differing across cleft type (0% iCL, 50% isolated cleft lip and palate [iCLP], 71.4% isolated cleft palate only [iCP]). On measures of word reading accuracy, iCL/P participants outscored uIR participants, with uAR participants scoring the highest. This pattern was specific to nonlexical reading tasks. Participants in the uAR and iCL/P groups outscored uIR participants on lexical tasks, with no significant differences between uAR and iCL/P. Evaluation of speech and hearing revealed no significant relationship to single word reading or achievement measures in the iCL/P group. Boys with iCL/P are at a higher risk of reading impairments, particularly within the iCP subset. Regular screening should be encouraged, with skills from both lexical and nonlexical routes assessed.

Tinfolec: A New French Web-Based Test for Reading Assessment in Primary School

The goal of the experiment was to examine the relevance of a new French web-based assessment, Tinfolec (Test INFOrmatisé d’évaluation de la LECture), the aim of which is to evaluate the reading abilities of children in primary grades. The participants were 1,016 children from Grades 2 to 5. They completed the five tasks of Tinfolec designed to assess the efficiency of the two procedures used to identify written words (the nonlexical route and the lexical orthographic route). We tested the reliability and validity of the new tool in a subsection of this sample. Correlational analyses provided evidence of the reliability and validity of Tinfolec. The results are consistent with the conventionally observed effect of lexical factors (length, consistency, and frequency) on written word processing. The results confirm the relevance of the proposed tasks. The study produced promising results and would allow practitioners to perform online assessments of reading skills.

A patient with aphasia using the nonsemantic lexical route for Kanji reading

ABSTRACTWe report a patient with aphasia, caused by cerebral hemorrhage, who probably used the nonsemantic lexical route when reading words aloud. To investigate the mechanisms underlying her reading dysfunction, we analyzed her reading abilities using the Dual-Route Cascaded Model. Language tests resulted in low correct percentages for both reading comprehension and reading nonwords aloud, suggesting problems in the semantic system and the nonlexical route. Conversely, the patient showed high scores on the reading words aloud task. Although she failed to understand many inconsistent-atypical words in the reading comprehension test, she correctly read most words aloud, suggesting that she used the nonsemantic lexical route. In addition, the lexical reading route was analyzed in detail by using inconsistent-atypical Kanji words as stimuli. Finally, we analyzed her reading dysfunction compared with previous cases.

Which is the Better Predictor of Reading Comprehension, Lexical Route^1 or Non-Lexical Route^2?

Which is the Better Predictor of Reading Comprehension, Lexical Route^1 or Non-Lexical Route^2?

The Effect of Length on Word Recognition (in Reading): The Case of Arabic // تأثير طول الكلمة على دقة القراءة: العربية كدراسة حالة

In this study, two experiments were conducted to assess the role of word length in visual word recognition. In Experiment 1 two lists of Arabic three and five letter words were used in a print word-reading task which measured accuracy and reading time. In Experiment 2, three, four and five letter words were displayed in the center of fixation on a screen in a naming task measuring accuracy and naming time. In reading, two contrasting processes have been suggested: the holistic process and the analytical process. According to the holistic process, the recognition of a word is determined by its global features and configuration. Consequently, reading consists of the simultaneous processing of all the letters of a word in parallel. In contrast, according to the analytical process, reading is a sequential screening of all the letters within a particular word. Length effect—that is, short words are recognized more rapidly and accurately than long words—is the signature of analytical processing of the non-lexical route due to its seriality which is caused by assembled phonology. The results of both experiments revealed that the average reading time of Arabic words from paper and screen was affected by word length, reflecting certain analytical processes and the activation of a non-lexical route, in which letters are processed sequentially.

Routes to Reading and Spelling: Testing the Predictions of Dual-Route Theory

Dual-route theory, which emphasizes the importance of lexical and nonlexical routes, makes specific predictions about the kinds of strategies that young students might adopt when attempting to correctly read and spell regular and irregular words. The current study tests these predictions by assessing strategy choice on regular, irregular, and nonword items among a group of 55 English-speaking students ages 8–10 years. Performance measures and verbal self-reports were used to classify strategy choice in reading and spelling. The results confirmed that students were able to draw from a wide repertoire of coexisting strategies to support their reading and spelling activities. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that pure lexical retrieval could best predict reading and spelling accuracy scores on irregular words, whereas both lexical and nonlexical strategies could, to varying degrees, predict scores on the regular items. Unexpectedly, none of the reported reading or spelling strategies could accurately predict students' scores on the nonword items after controlling for age. The theoretical implications for the application of dual-route theory to early reading and spelling, especially in relation to nonword performance, are discussed and outlined.

Cognitive neuropsychological analysis of differential reading and spelling disorder mechanisms in a patient with aphasia

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to determine if differential reading and spelling mechanisms were involved in a Japanese patient with aphasia. In our case, the patient scored low on all of the administered reading tasks, suggesting that both the reading lexical and non-lexical routes were impaired. In contrast, his writing-to-dictation score for Kana nonwords was high, suggesting that the spelling non-lexical route was intact. However, the patient scored low on a writing-to-dictation task comprised of high-familiarity Kanji words. The spelling lexical route was thought to be impaired. Therefore, the mechanism(s) involved in reading and spelling may differ in this case.

Visual processing of connected and unconnected letters and words in Arabic

A letter-reading task (Experiments 1) and a word-reading task of regular words (Experiments 2) and of visually distorted words (Experiments 3) were used to examine the reciprocal interaction between phonological encoding strategies and visual factors, such as the global word shape, local letters shape, and inter-letter spacing. Our participants comprised Arabic readers familiar with different letter and word forms (connected vs. unconnected: without inter-letter spaces vs. with inter-letter spaces). In addition, this study is the first instance of the word length effect being studied in an Arabic context using different word lengths (3 vs. 5 letters). The average reading times for Arabic words are affected by the word connectivity, since the average reading time is shorter for connected than unconnected words of all word lengths (3 and 5 letters) reflecting the activation of lexical route, which processes letters in letter strings in parallel. As well, the average reading times for Arabic words are affected by the word length, since the average reading time is shorter for 3-letter words than 5-letter words reflecting the activation of non-lexical route, which processes letters in letter strings sequentially. Length effect is the signature of the non-lexical route due to its seriality caused by assembled phonology.

List context effects in languages with opaque and transparent orthographies: a challenge for models of reading.

This paper offers a review of data which show that reading is a flexible and dynamic process and that readers can exert strategic control over it. Two main hypotheses on the control of reading processes have been suggested: the route de-emphasis hypothesis and the time-criterion hypothesis. According to the former, the presence of irregular words in the list might lead to an attenuation of the non-lexical process, while the presence of non-words could trigger a de-emphasis of the lexical route. An alternative account is proposed by the time-criterion hypothesis whereby the reader sets a flexible deadline to initiate the response. According to the latter view, it is the average pronunciation difficulty of the items in the block that modulates the time-criterion for response. However, it is worth noting that the list composition has been shown to exert different effects in transparent compared to opaque orthographies, as the consistency of spelling-sound correspondences can influence the processing costs of the non-lexical pathway. In transparent orthographies, the non-lexical route is not resource demanding and can successfully contribute to the pronunciation of regular words, thus its de-emphasis could not be as useful/necessary as in opaque orthographies. The complex patterns of results from the literature on list context effects are a challenge for computational models of reading which face the problem of simulating strategic control over reading processes. Different proposals suggest a modification of parameter setting in the non-lexical route or the implementation of a new module aimed at focusing attention on the output of the more convenient pathway. Simulation data and an assessment of the models’ fit to the behavioral results are presented and discussed to shed light on the role of the cognitive system when reading aloud.

The locus of the masked onset priming effect

This study investigates the masked onset priming effect (MOPE) in Korean. The results revealed facilitated naming for nonwords written in the alphabetic syllabary hangul when primes and targets shared an initial consonant-vowel (CV) syllable as well as when they shared only an initial onset (C) phoneme. However, there was greater priming at the syllable level than at the phoneme level. Taken together with previous research on Korean (Kim & Davis, 2002), these findings indicate that the MOPE reflects facilitated grapheme-to-phoneme conversion processes when the pronunciation of the target is computed through the nonlexical route, and are interpreted to support the Forster and Davis (1991) model of this effect.

Orthographic Depth Modulates Reading Route Selection: An Electrical Neuroimaging Study

Introduction The orthographic Depth Hypothesis (Katz and Feldman, 1983) posits that different reading routes are engaged depending on the expertise of the reader but also on the type of grapheme/phoneme correspondence of the language being read. Shallow orthographies (e.g. German and Italian) with consistent grapheme to phoneme correspondences favor encoding via non-lexical pathways, where each phoneme is sequentially mapped to its corresponding grapheme. In contrast, deep orthographies (e.g. French and English), with inconsistent grapheme to phoneme correspondences favor lexical pathways, where phonemes are retrieved from memory structures. Only few studies investigated the impact of orthographic depth on brain response while reading. Moreover, because they used between subject or cross-language designs, the interpretability of previous studies on the effect of orthographic depth is limited. The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of orthographic depth on reading route selection using an experimental design enabling isolating the effect of orthographic depth. Method We presented the same pseudowords (PWs) to highly proficient bilinguals and manipulated the orthographic depth of PW reading by embedding them among two separated language contexts (German and French), implicating either shallow or deep orthography. High density 128-channel electroencephalography was recorded during the task. Results The topographies of the event-related potential were different between PWs read in deep orthographic context and PWs read in shallow orthographic context at 300-360ms after stimulus onset, indicating distinct brain networks engaged in reading during this time window. The brain source underlying these topographic effects were located within left inferior frontal, left parietal and left cingular areas. Conclusion We propose that in deep orthographic context, reading PWs cannot rely on the routine lexical pathways and thus switching to the non-lexical route is necessary. In controast, reading in a shallow orthographic context favors non-lexical route processing which fits PW reading. The topographic modulation might thus reflect the recruitment of lexical pathways in the deep but not in the shallow context. Analysis of electrical source estimation over the period of topographic modulation supports this hypothesis by showing that inferior frontal areas, a region shown to subserve phonological processing, is differentially engaged between the deep vs shallow conditions. In addition, a difference in the activity of parietal-cingular areas suggests a modulation of attentional demands related to route selection processes. Non-lexical route may be less automatized than lexical route processing. These collective results support a modulation of reading route selection by orthographic depth.

How damaged brains repeat words: A computational approach

Two routes have been proposed for auditory repetition: a lexical route which activates a lexical item and retrieves its phonology, and a nonlexical route which maps input phonology directly onto output phonology. But when is the nonlexical route recruited? In a sample of 103 aphasic patients, we use computational models to select patients who do and do not recruit the nonlexical route, and compare them in light of three hypotheses: 1 – Lexical–phonological hypothesis: when the lexical route is weak, the nonlexical route is recruited. 2 – Nonlexical hypothesis: when the nonlexical route is weak, it is abandoned. 3 – Semantic-access hypothesis: when access to meaning fails, the nonlexical route is recruited. In neurocognitive terms, hypotheses 1 and 2 identify different aspects of the intactness of the dorsal stream, while the third hypothesis focuses on the ventral stream. Our findings (and a subsequent meta-analysis of four studies) support hypotheses 2 and 3. Ultimately, we claim that the choice about whether to recruit the nonlexical route is guided, not by assessment of production abilities that support repetition, but instead by relying on accessible cues, namely whether the speaker understands the word, or can remember its sequence of phonemes.

Brain routes for reading in adults with and without autism: EMEG evidence.

Reading utilises at least two neural pathways. The temporal lexical route visually maps whole words to their lexical entries, whilst the nonlexical route decodes words phonologically via parietal cortex. Readers typically employ the lexical route for familiar words, but poor comprehension plus precocity at mechanically ‘sounding out’ words suggests that differences might exist in autism. Combined MEG/EEG recordings of adults with autistic spectrum conditions (ASC) and controls while reading revealed preferential recruitment of temporal areas in controls and additional parietal recruitment in ASC. Furthermore, a lack of differences between semantic word categories was consistent with previous suggestion that people with ASC may lack a ‘default’ lexical-semantic processing mode. These results are discussed with reference to dual-route models of reading.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10803-013-1858-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Nonword reading: Comparing dual-route cascaded and connectionist dual-process models with human data.

Two prominent dual-route computational models of reading aloud are the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model, and the connectionist dual-process plus (CDP+) model. While sharing similarly designed lexical routes, the two models differ greatly in their respective nonlexical route architecture, such that they often differ on nonword pronunciation. Neither model has been appropriately tested for nonword reading pronunciation accuracy to date. We argue that empirical data on the nonword reading pronunciation of people is the ideal benchmark for testing. Data were gathered from 45 Australian-English-speaking psychology undergraduates reading aloud 412 nonwords. To provide contrast between the models, the nonwords were chosen specifically because DRC and CDP+ disagree on their pronunciation. Both models failed to accurately match the experiment data, and both have deficiencies in nonword reading performance. However, the CDP+ model performed significantly worse than the DRC model. CDP++, the recent successor to CDP+, had improved performance over CDP+, but was also significantly worse than DRC. In addition to highlighting performance shortcomings in each model, the variety of nonword responses given by participants points to a need for models that can account for this variety.

Evidence for a Non-Lexical Influence on Children’s Auditory Repetition of Familiar Words

This paper examines evidence for a nonlexical influence on children's repetition of real words. We investigate the extent to which two computational models of auditory repetition can simulate the performance of 68 children aged between 5 and 11years-old when they are attempting to repeat familiar words. Both computational accounts were derived from Foygel and Dell's (J Mem Lang 43:182-216, 2000) semantic-phonological model of picture-naming. Results showed that a dual-route model in which a lexical and a nonlexical route work together to repeat familiar words (Hanley etal. in Cogn Neuropsychol 21:147-158, 2004) provided an accurate simulation of children's repetition, whereas Foygel and Dell (J Mem Lang 43:182-216, 2000) single lexical-route model under-predicted performance. The only exception was the repetition performance of 5year-old children, which was over-predicted by the dual-route model. It is argued that at 5years of age, some children have available both a lexical and a nonlexical repetition route but the output of the two routes does not summate when real words are being repeated. Some young children may lack the attentional skills that would enable them to co-ordinate the activity of the lexical and nonlexical repetition routes.