Chinese Pure Word Processing Disorder Mechanism Dyslexia Research

Objective : To find the character-or - word impairment mechanism in Chinese pure alexia, we administer a detailed and deep research into a Chinese pure alexic through the experimental neuropsychological method.Method : Firstly, in order to rule out any other impairments in language, memory and intelligence ,we give different kinds of measuring scales to the patient in different phases. Then according to the test results, we get to confirm the patient as a case in pure alexia. Secondly, due to the special manifestations of reading impairment in the pure alexic, we devise and give some more profound neuropsychological experiments to find out the impairment mechanism of the pure alexic. Results:1)the patient's semantic system is relatively intact, but his orthographic processing ability is apparently impaired.2)the patient has a special advantage in reading single-body characters over that in reading Chinese compounds. Through the statistical analysis ,we find out that the performance in reading whatever high frequency or low frequency single -body characters is significantly better than that of reading high frequency Chinese compounds (p<0.05). However, the performance in reading low frequency single-body character is no better than that in low frequency Chinese compounds.3)although his performance in reading concrete character is better than that in reading abstract characters, there is no significant differences.4)when reading Chinese compounds ,there are no significant strokes effect and structure effect.Conclusions: the experimental results show that Chinese character radicals may be the functional orthographic processing units, and the impairment in the integration of these functional processing units may explain the mechanism of Chinese pure alexia, and this impairment mechanism may be analogous to that of letter-by-letter reading in alphabetic pure alexia.