scholarly journals Deep Dysgraphia in Turkish

2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 59-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilhan Raman ◽  
Brendan Stuart Weekes

Deep dysgraphic patients make semantic errors when writing to dictation and they cannot write nonwords. Extant reports of deep dysgraphia come from languages with relatively opaque orthographies. Turkish is a transparent orthography because the bidirectional mappings between phonology and orthography are completely predictable. We report BRB, a biscriptal Turkish-English speaker who has acquired dysgraphia characterised by semantic errors as well as effects of grammatical class and imageability on writing in Turkish. Nonword spelling is abolished. A similar pattern of errors is observed in English. BRB is the first report of acquired dysgraphia in a truly transparent writing system. We argue that deep dysgraphia results from damage to the mappings that are common to both languages between word meanings and orthographic representations.

Author(s):  
Sharry Shakory ◽  
Xi Chen ◽  
S. Hélène Deacon

Purpose The value of shared reading as an opportunity for learning word meanings, or semantics, is well established; it is less clear whether children learn about the orthography, or word spellings, in this context. We tested whether children can learn the spellings and meanings of new words at the same time during a tightly controlled shared reading session. We also examined whether individual differences in either or both of orthographic and semantic learning during shared reading in English were related to word reading in English and French concurrently and 6 months longitudinally in emergent English–French bilinguals. Method Sixty-two Grade 1 children (35 girls; M age = 75.89 months) listened to 12 short stories, each containing four instances of a novel word, while the examiner pointed to the text. Choice measures of the spellings and meanings of the novel words were completed immediately after reading each set of three stories and again 1 week later. Standardized measures of word reading as well as controls for nonverbal reasoning, vocabulary, and phonological awareness were also administered. Results Children scored above chance on both immediate and delayed measures of orthographic and semantic learning. Orthographic learning was related to both English and French word reading at the same time point and 6 months later. In contrast, the relations between semantic learning and word reading were nonsignificant for both languages after including controls. Conclusion Shared reading is a valuable context for learning both word meanings and spellings, and the learning of orthographic representations in particular is related to word reading abilities. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13877999


2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 1111-1112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Maratsos

This discussion argues that for many word meanings, the child has to assemble a new category, using relatively slow information-sifting processes. This does not cause high semantic errors, because children probably hold off using a word until much such sifting has occurred, rather than producing the new word as soon as they have any information on it.


2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
HyangHee Kim ◽  
Duk L. Na ◽  
Eun Sook Park

Dysgraphia due to a focal brain lesion can be characterized by substitution, transposition, deletion and/or addition errors of graphemes or strokes. However, those linguistic errors can be language-specific because the writing system of a given language may influence error patterns. We investigated a Korean stroke patient, a 57-year-old English teacher with dysgraphia both in Korean Han-geul (한글) and in English alphabet writings. The results of an experimental testing revealed transposition errors between a consonant and a vowel only in English but not in Korean writings. This austerity of vowel-consonant position may be attributed to a unique Korean writing system of a spatially well-formed syllabic configuration or block with consonant(s) and a vowel. In light of a neuropsychological model of writing, which depicts a multi-level spelling and writing process, we suggest a spatial-constructional component of internal orthographic representations in Korean writing. This Korean graphemic configuration feature may be resistant to a focal, left cerebral damage, and thus, we also discuss our results in terms of cerebral lateralization of the writing processes.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Nicholas Root ◽  
Pushpita Bhattacharyya ◽  
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Abstract Grapheme–color synesthetes experience graphemes (e.g., letters of the alphabet) as having a specific, consistent color. Most studies of grapheme–color synesthesia have only examined synesthetes in English, leaving underexplored the question of how synesthetic phenomenology might differ in languages that do not use alphabets. In particular, grapheme–color synesthesia in an abugida (a segmental writing system in which vowels are added to consonant graphemes using ‘accent’-like diacritical marks) has never been studied. Here, we present a case study of a Bengali synesthete, MJ, the first report of a grapheme–color synesthete in an abugida. First, we show that for MJ, diacritics influence the overall color of the consonant grapheme they modify, ‘pulling’ it toward the color she experiences for the vowel. Second, we describe and analyze the complex synesthetic experiences reported by MJ for conjunct graphemes, a unique orthographic feature of Brahmi-derived scripts (such as Bengali) in which multiple graphemes are visually combined into a single ‘merged’ grapheme. Finally, we show that in addition to these language-specific features, MJ’s synesthetic associations are influenced by some of the same linguistic properties (such as orthography and phonology) that influence synesthetic associations in other languages. We conclude that the idiosyncratic features of MJ’s synesthesia reflect unique properties of the Bengali writing system, that more studies of synesthesia in non-alphabetic scripts are needed, and that synesthetic phenomenology can offer insights into how linguistic properties shape grapheme representation in the brain.


1998 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 621-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
PELAGIE M. BEESON ◽  
DEBORAH INSALACO

Two individuals with anomic aphasia and acquired alexia were each provided treatment for their reading impairment. Although reading of single words in isolation was fairly accurate, their text reading was slow and effortful, including functor substitutions and semantic errors. Prior to treatment, reading reaction times for single words showed grammatical class and word-length effects. Both patients responded positively to a treatment protocol that included two phases: (1) multiple oral rereading of text, and (2) reading phrase-formatted text that had increased spacing between phrasal clauses. Their reading rates for text improved while maintaining good comprehension. Following treatment, reading reaction times for single words showed the elimination of grammatical class and word-length effects, suggesting improved access to word forms, particularly functors. (JINS, 1998, 4, 621–635.)


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (12) ◽  
pp. 2217-2235
Author(s):  
Philip Thierfelder ◽  
Gillian Wigglesworth ◽  
Gladys Tang

We used an error disruption paradigm to investigate how deaf readers from Hong Kong, who had varying levels of reading fluency, use orthographic, phonological, and mouth-shape-based (i.e., “visemic”) codes during Chinese sentence reading while also examining the role of contextual information in facilitating lexical retrieval and integration. Participants had their eye movements recorded as they silently read Chinese sentences containing orthographic, homophonic, homovisemic, or unrelated errors. Sentences varied in terms of how much contextual information was available leading up to the target word. Fixation time analyses revealed that in early fixation measures, deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations. However, in contexts where targets were highly predictable, fixation times on homophonic errors decreased relative to those on unrelated errors, suggesting that higher levels of contextual predictability facilitated early phonological activation. In the measure of total reading time, results indicated that deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations, but they also appeared to activate word meanings through visemic representations in late error recovery processes. Examining the influence of reading fluency level on error recovery processes, we found that, in comparison to deaf readers with lower reading fluency levels, those with higher reading fluency levels could more quickly resolve homophonic and orthographic errors in the measures of gaze duration and total reading time, respectively. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of these findings as they relate to the lexical quality hypothesis and the dual-route cascaded model of reading by deaf adults.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cornelia van Scherpenberg ◽  
Nora Fieder ◽  
Sharon Savage ◽  
Lyndsey Nickels

Objective: The progressive loss of stored knowledge about word meanings in semanticvariant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) has been attributed to an amodal “storage” deficit of the semantic system. Performance consistency has been proposed to be a key characteristic of storage deficits but has not been examined in close detail and larger participant cohorts. Method: We assessed whether 10 people with svPPA showed consistency in picture naming across 3 closely consecutive sessions. We examined item-by-item consistency of naming accuracy and specific error types, while controlling for the effects of word-related variables such as word frequency, familiarity, and age of acquisition. Results: Participants were very consistent in their accurate and inaccurate responses over and above any effects of the word-related variables. Analyses of error types that compared consistency of semantic errors, correct responses, and other error types (e.g., phonologically related errors, unrelated errors) revealed lower consistency. Conclusions: Our findings support the assumption that semantic features constituting semantic representations of objects are progressively lost in people with svPPA and are therefore consistently unavailable during naming. Variability in the production of error types occurs when distinctive features of an object are lost, resulting in the selection of semantically or visually similar items or in the failure to select an item and a response omission. The assessment of performance consistency sheds light on the underlying impairment of people with semantic deficits (semantic storage vs. access deficit). This can support the choice of an appropriate treatment technique to maintain or reteach semantic information.


1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (01) ◽  
pp. 141-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard M. Thomas ◽  
George O. Poinar

A sporulating Aspergillus is described from a piece of Eocene amber originating from the Dominican Republic. The Aspergillus most closely resembles a form of the white spored phase of Aspergillus janus Raper and Thom. This is the first report of a fossil species of Aspergillus.


1988 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 343-347
Author(s):  
M. Klapisch

AbstractA formal expansion of the CRM in powers of a small parameter is presented. The terms of the expansion are products of matrices. Inverses are interpreted as effects of cascades.It will be shown that this allows for the separation of the different contributions to the populations, thus providing a natural classification scheme for processes involving atoms in plasmas. Sum rules can be formulated, allowing the population of the levels, in some simple cases, to be related in a transparent way to the quantum numbers.


Author(s):  
G. I. Kaye ◽  
J. D. Cole

For a number of years we have used an adaptation of Komnick's KSb(OH)6-OsO4 fixation method for the localization of sodium in tissues in order to study transporting epithelia under a number of different conditions. We have shown that in actively transporting rabbit gallbladder epithelium, large quantities of NaSb(OH)6 precipitate are found in the distended intercellular compartment, while localization of precipitate is confined to the inner side of the lateral plasma membrane in inactive gallbladder epithelium. A similar pattern of distribution of precipitate has been demonstrated in human and rabbit colon in active and inactive states and in the inactive colonic epithelium of hibernating frogs.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document