Dyslexia – a substantial difficulty in acquiring fluent and efficient reading – is the most common form of learning disability, present in more than 80% of the individuals diagnosed with learning problems (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). While early academic research described dyslexia as a visual disorder, "congenital word blindness" (e.g., Morgan, 1896; Orton, 1928), studies in the last 40 yea...

BACKGROUND Identification of facial emotions has been found to be impaired in schizophrenia but there are uncertainties about the neuropsychological specificity of the finding. METHOD Twenty-two patients with schizophrenia and 20 healthy controls were given tests requiring identification of facial emotion, judgement of the intensity of emotional expressions without identification, familiar fa...

We report a patient (KAS) who presented with pure dynamic aphasia in the context of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). KAS had the hallmark propositional language impairment in the context of preserved naming, reading, repetition and comprehension skills. The severity of KAS's propositional language deficit was demonstrated to be comparable to other dynamic aphasic patients. Remarkably, desp...

In this study, we examined the neuroanatomy of dyslexic (14 males, four females) and control (19 males, 13 females) children in grades 4-6 from a family genetics study. The dyslexics had specific deficits in word reading relative to the population mean and verbal IQ, but did not have primary language or motor deficits. Measurements of the posterior temporal lobe, inferior frontal gyrus, cerebel...

One of the most compelling findings in aphasic research is that neurological impairment may affect words of one grammatical class more than others, for instance, verbs more than nouns (e.g., Miceli, Silveri, Villa, & Caramazza, 1984; McCarthy & Warrington, 1985) or vice versa (e.g., Bates, Chen, Tzeng, Li, & Opie, 1991; Zingeser & Berndt, 1988). The underlying mechanisms of such grammatical dis...

We report performance measures for lexical decision (LD), word naming (NMG), and progressive demasking (PDM) for a large sample of monosyllabic monomorphemic French words (N = 1,482). We compare the tasks and also examine the impact of word length, word frequency, initial phoneme, orthographic and phonological distance to neighbors, age-of-acquisition, and subjective frequency. Our results show...

Objective We tested the claim that age-related increases in knowledge interfere with word retrieval, leading to word finding failures. We did this by relating a measure of crystallized intelligence to tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states and picture naming accuracy. Method Participants were from a large (N = 708), cross-sectional (aged 18-88 years), population-based sample from the Cambridge Cent...

We present a theoretical account of letter-by-letter reading (LBL) that reconciles discrepant findings associated with this form of acquired dyslexia. We claim that LBL reading is caused by a deficit that affects the normal activation of the orthographic representation of the stimulus. In spite of this lower-level deficit, the degraded orthographic information may be processed further, and lexi...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with a general cognitive decline that affects the memory and language domains. Thus, an oral production deficit with a lexical-semantic origin has been widely observed in these patients. Their written production capacities, however, have been much less studied. We assessed the spelling abilities of 22 AD patients and a group of matched healthy controls wit...

Pure alexia is a reading impairment in which patients appear to read letter-by-letter. This disorder is typically accounted for in terms of a peripheral deficit that occurs early on in the reading system, prior to the activation of orthographic word representations. The peripheral interpretation of pure alexia has recently been challenged by the phonological deficit hypothesis, which claims tha...