Effects of age of acquisition and semantic transparency on reading characters in Chinese dyslexia

Abstract

This study examined the effects of the age of acquisition (AOA) and semantic transparency on the reading aloud ability of a Chinese dyslexic individual, TWT, who relied on the semantic pathway to name characters. Both AOA and semantic transparency significantly predicted naming accuracy and distinguished the occurrence of correct responses and semantic errors from other errors. A post hoc analysis of subsets of items orthogonally varied in the AOA and semantic transparency revealed an interaction between the two variables. These findings converge on reports of AOA and semantic effects on deep dyslexic individuals reading alphabetic scripts. The case of TWT, together with recent results of another Chinese dyslexic individual who reads via the nonsemantic route and exhibits the effects of AOA and phonological consistency, supports the arbitrary mapping hypothesis, which states that the AOA effect resides in the connection between two levels of representation. © Cambridge University Press 2010.