A treatment study of a Cantonese-speaking dyslexic patient

Abstract

We describe a case study evaluating the efficacy of a reading therapy on a Cantonese brain-injured patient, CSH, with hypothesized deficits to the semantic and nonsemantic reading routes. The treatment emphasized the reestablishment of phonetic radical-to-syllable correspondences in regular and partially regular phonetic compounds and encouraged the patient to make use of the semantic information associated with the signific radical to assist her in arriving at the target pronunciation. By the end of the therapy, CSH read all the treatment items flawlessly and improved significantly on reading generalization probes while no observable change was found in the irregular phonetic compound control probes. Specific treatment effect was evidenced by the synchrony between the introduction of training and marked progress seen at various treatment stages, and greater improvement on treatment than generalization probes. In addition, CSH demonstrated an increase in regularization errors coupled with a decrease in 'no responses'.