Reading without meaning : the case of Cantonese developmental hyperlexia

Abstract

This study addressed the issue of whether oral reading of Chinese is mediated by semantics in children with hyperlexia. A Cantonese child with hyperlexia (C.C.H.), 19 chronological age-matched (CA), and 19 mental age-matched (MA) controls were assessed on their semantic knowledge and oral reading of words and characters. Despite having an underdeveloped lexical-semantic system, the oral reading scores of words and single characters of C.C.H. was comparable to his CA and MA controls. He showed better oral reading of the words he knew than those he did not and significantly poorer reading of bisyllabic words containing homographic heterophonic characters, of which correct pronunciation could only be disambiguated by the word context. Importantly, similar to his CA and MA peers, low-frequency, low-imageability and irregular characters, which required more semantic support for phonological retrieval, were named poorer during character reading. The observations support the Parallel Distributed Processing model of reading (PDP: Plaut, McLelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996), which argues that successful oral reading in Chinese hyperlexia is semantically associated.