A model-driven treatment of a Cantonese-speaking dyslexic patient with impairment to the semantic and nonsemantic pathways

Abstract

This paper describes a case study evaluating the efficacy of a reading therapy on a Cantonese brain-injured patient, CSH, with hypothesised deficits to the semantic and nonsemantic reading routes. The treatment emphasised the re-establishment 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 generalisation 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 the marked progress seen at various treatment stages, and greater improvement on treatment than on generalisation probes. In addition, CSH demonstrated an increase in regularisation errors coupled with a decrease in "no responses." © 2005 Psychology Press Ltd.