Semantic errors in deep dyslexia: does orthographic depth matter?

Abstract

Semantic errors of oral reading by aphasic patients are said to be comparatively rare in languages with a shallow orthography. The present report concerns three bilingual brain-damaged patients who prior to their stroke were fluent in both English, an orthographically deep language, and Welsh, an orthographically shallow language. On a picture-naming task, each patient made a similar proportion of semantic errors in the two languages. Similarly, in oral reading of the corresponding words, no patient produced proportionally more semantic paralexias in English than in Welsh. The findings are discussed in relation to the summation hypothesis as invoked by Miceli, Capasso, and Caramazza (1994) to explain apparent differences in frequency of semantic errors of reading in languages differing in orthographic depth.