Noriko Haruhara

Cognitive neuropsychological and regional cerebral blood flow study of a developmentally dyslexic Japanese child.

Remedial training programs for patients with developmental dyslexia based on the cognitive neuropsychological approach have been reported. 1-3However, no cognitive neuropsychological studies of a remedial program for the Japanese writing system for use by subjects with developmental dyslexia have been performed. The area of the brain responsible for developmental dyslexia has been reported by positron emission tomography (PET) in adult dyslexics; most previous studies of the regional cerebral blood flow in dyslexic patients were done using PET for adult dyslexics. 4-10 However, we measured the regional cerebral blood

An investigation into kana reading development in normal and dyslexic Japanese children using length and lexicality effects

This is the first study to report differences between Japanese children with and without dyslexia in the way string-length and lexicality effects are manifested when reading Japanese kana. These children were asked to read kana words and non-words consisting of either two or five kana characters. The results showed that the error rates of the normal Preschoolers and Primary-School children with dyslexia were higher than those of the normal Primary-School children. Further, the reading latencies of the normal Preschoolers, First-graders and dyslexics were significantly longer than those of the normal Second, Third and Fifth/Sixth graders. Moreover, reading latencies became shorter as the age of the participants increased. Both normal and dyslexic children showed significant effects of length and lexicality on reading latencies. However, the interaction between the length and lexicality was only seen in normal children from the Second-grade onwards. These results suggest that (1) normal First-graders reach a ceiling in terms of reading accuracy and that (2) as Japanese normal children become older, they become better at lexical reading processes, which leads to fluent kana reading, but that (3) the dyslexics, even at Fifth/Sixth grades, have not developed sufficient lexical reading processes.

The Eye Movements of Japanese Pure Alexic Patients During Single Word and Nonword Reading

Abstract Two Japanese patients with pure alexia, SH and YH, who showed right homonymous hemianopia following a left occipital lobe lesion, demonstrated letter-by-letter (LBL) reading in pronouncing Japanese kana words and nonwords. In contrast to alphabetic letters, each Japanese kana character has an invariant and identical pronunciation whether it appears in isolation or as a component of any word and nonword string. It is important to investigate the eye movements as well as reading latency and duration in Japanese-speaking LBL readers. Relative to normal controls, these patients demonstrated a more robust string-length effect, which was characterized by larger increases in reading latency and duration as well as in the number of fixations as the string length increased. We propose that in pure alexia, parallel activation of orthographic representations is abnormally delayed but not completely abolished.