(~20 minutes)

Oral Reading

Reading aloud assesses orthographic input, phonologic output, and articulation systems, and connecting pathways between these systems. Patients try to read aloud nonwords with unambiguous (highly consistent) pronunciations, regular words, and irregular words. Reading nonwords depends mainly on a direct mapping from orthography to phonology, whereas reading irregular words may depend in some cases on the semantic system or on non-semantic whole word representations. A selective deficit of the direct reading pathway ('phonological dyslexia' (Beauvois & Derouesne, 1979)) is diagnosed if nonword accuracy is abnormally low relative to words and if the rate of lexicalization errors is abnormally high. Semantic errors constitute evidence of an additional deficit in the semantic pathway ('deep dyslexia' (Coltheart et al., 1980)). A selective deficit of the semantic reading pathway ('surface dyslexia' (Patterson et al., 1985)) is diagnosed if accuracy on irregular words is low relative to regular words, and if the rate of regularization errors is abnormally high (Binder et al., 2016).

Materials:

• 188 words, with controlled manipulation of length, frequency, imageability, and orth-phon regularity
• 36 pseudowords matched to a subset of the words on orthographic and phonologic characteristics

Procedure:

• stimulus presented visually in center of screen
• patient attempts to read each item aloud, responses automatically digitized
• The 224 trials are divided into four balanced 56-trial blocks to avoid fatigue.

Scoring and Data analysis:

• first complete response scored, errors categorized
• %correct scores; chi-square tests for length, lexicality, frequency, imageability, regularity effects
• mean response time per condition; ANOVA for main effects and interactions