Dyslexia Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Dyslexia, including details on learning, reading, education, teaching, treatment.

Semantic ambiguity and the failure of inhibition hypothesis as an explanation for reading errors in deep dyslexia.

Colangelo A, Buchanan L

Department of Psychology, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ont., N9B 3P4, Canada.

We report evidence for dissociation between explicit and implicit access to word representations in a deep dyslexic patient (JO). JO read aloud a series of ambiguous (e.g., bank) and unambiguous (e.g., food) words and performed a lexical decision task using these same items. When required to explicitly access the items (i.e., naming), JO showed relative impairment for ambiguous compared with unambiguous words. In contrast, the same stimuli produced an advantage for ambiguous words in lexical decision. The results are discussed within a framework of deep dyslexia that considers errors in production to arise through a failure to inhibit spuriously activated candidate representations.

Published 4 January 2005 in Brain Cogn, 57(1): 39-42.
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