Acquired Dyslexia in a Turkish-English Speaker

The Turkish script is characterised by means of completely transparent bidirectional mappings between orthography and phonology. To date, there has been no reported evidence of acquired dyslexia in Turkish speakers leading to the na??ve view that reading and writing riddles in Turkish are probably rare. We examined the expanse to which phonological impairment and orthographic transparency influence reading disorders in a native Turkish speaker. BRB is a bilingual Turkish-English speaker with reaching far down dysphasia accompanied by acquired dyslexia in one as well as the other languages. The main findings are an result of imageability on reading in Turkish coincident with surface dyslexia in English and preserv nonword reading. BRB's acquired dyslexia allude tos that damage to phonological representations might have a effect for learning to read in Turkish. We argue that BRB's acquired dyslexia has a public locus in chronic underactivation of phonological representations in Turkish and English. Despite a belonging to all locus, reading problems manifest themselves differently according to properties of the script and the emblem of task.

Key Words: Acquired dyslexia, orthographic transparency, phonological deficit, Turkish-English bilingual and biscriptal reader

INTRODUCTION

Research investigating the issues of orthographic transparency on reading and writing has flourished in novel years. However, the study of individuals with acquired reading and writing impairments has ignored the results of orthographic transparency. This is regrettable since cognitive neuropsychological studies of patients with acquired dyslexia can reveal a great deal of about the functioning of the normal reading combination of parts to form a whole as well as how impairments to the normal a whole can lead to developmental dyslexia (see Coltheart, Rastle, Perry Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001 for a discussion). rife theories of reading do not commit to a view about results of orthographic transparency on reading and writing impairments. However, in our view, case studies of acquired dyslexia can contribute to understanding patterns of developmental dyslexia seen in languages other than English.

We know that riddles processing the phonological properties of a word are a precursor to dyslexia in several languages (Goswami, 2003; Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, & Schneider, 2003; Ramus, 2003; Snowling, 2000; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987; Ziegler, Perry Ma-Wyatt, Ladner, & Shulte-Korne, 2003) These point to be solved [i]or[/i] settleds include difficulties on verbal short-term memory tasks including nonword repetition and rapid naming, as well as meta-linguistic tasks of that kind as phonological awareness and phonological recoding, leading to the phonological deficit hypothesis, which is now supported by means of numerous studies. A coherent account of dyslexia must explain by what mode these phonological impairments lead to reading and writing riddles across scripts, although clearly, the unique features of a script must constrain the phenotype of dyslexia that is observ in any given language (Yin & Weekes, 2003) There is an emerging view that phonological point in disputes observed in children with reading and writing riddles may be independent of language and hence mark of script (Goswami, 2003; Goswami et al., 2003; Ziegler et al., 2003)

Type of script can be characterised in metes of the predictability of the mappings between orthography and phonology (O->P) In English, O->P mappings are relatively unpredictable and thus can be called opaque. In other languages of the like kind as German, Greek, Italian, and Spanish, O->P mappings are relatively predictable and, therefore, transparent. English orthography is opaque as it is characterised by dint of irregularity and inconsistency, and these variables are highly correlated (see Henderson, 1982 for a review; Venezky 1970; Wijk, 1966 for an account of spelling-sound dominions in English). Word regularity consigns to whether a word conforms to grapheme to phoneme dominion knowledge, whereas consistency refers to whether subword units of the like kind as the rime can be pronounced in more than individual way (e.g., /ead/). Both regularity and consistency have an issue on reading in English although their relative importance is still being debated (see Cortese & Simpson, 2000)

It is not clear by what mode phonological impairments would manifest in a script of the like kind as Turkish in which O->P (and P->O) mappings are entirely predictable (Raman, 2003) individual hypothesis is that phonological impairments lead to reading and writing question s in any language regardless of the predictability of the script. There is growing evidence to support this from studies of dyslexia in languages ranging from Chinese to Slovakian (see Smythe, Everatt, & Salter, 2004) A different hypothesis is that predictability-or more precisely grain size-of the script is critical to whether or not phonological impairments will manifest as reading and writing impairments (Wydell & Butterworth, 1999) Turkish was omitted from the Smythe et al. review of dyslexia across languages despite reports of dyslexia in transparent orthographies (Finnish, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish). This must not be taken as support for the view that dyslexia is not not absent in Turkish speakers. Rather, we believe that reading and writing enigmas can be observed in Turkish if the critical features of the language are considered when ordeals for dyslexia are administered.