Dyslexia presentation in Chinese speaking Primary Progressive Aphasia individuals
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1
Global Brain Health Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
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2
University of California, San Francisco, United States
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3
The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR China
Background. Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a dementia syndrome that mainly characterized by speech and language deficits at the early phase of the disease. Based on the neurolinguistic features and neuroanatomy involved, PPA can be classified into three variants: semantic (sv), nonfluent/agrammatic (nfv) and logopenic variants (lv).
More than 85% of the world population does not speak the English language as their first or second language. Current knowledge of PPA has mainly derived from English native speakers. Thus, linguistic features that are nonexistent in or differ from the English language have not been well delineated. Incorporating other languages into PPA research is imperative to provide more comprehensive care for an increasingly diverse population worldwide.
It has been well established that English svPPA individuals exhibit surface dyslexia and lvPPA English speakers tend to struggle with pseudowords. Given that the Chinese language is a highly opaque language and adopts logographic scripts, it is unclear whether Chinese PPA individuals exhibit similar dyslexic patterns as English speakers.
Method. Through the combined efforts from University of California, San Francisco, Taiwan (National Tsing Hua University, National Taiwan University, Buddhist Tzu Chi Hospital), and Hong Kong (The Education University of Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin Hospital), CLAP (Chinese Language Assessment for PPA) project is launched to investigate the neurolinguistics features and neuroanatomical correlations of Chinese speaking PPA individuals. The project is actively recruiting PPA and healthy participants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and San Francisco.
To study dyslexia characteristics of PPA, the CLAP battery developed two reading lists: real words and pseudowords. The real words list consists of 20 regular, 20 irregular semantic-phonetic compound (S-P) words and 10 pictographic words, equally divided by their word frequency and concreteness. Within the pseudowords reading task, participants are asked to read 50 semantic-phonetic compound words of different radical configurations and 10 pictographic pseudowords.
Results. CLAP project has recruited 5 healthy controls, 6 PPA individuals (2 nonfluent/ agrammatic variant (nfv), 2 semantic variant (sv) and 2 logopenic variant (lv) PPA). Preliminary results indicated that svPPA performed lower in semantic-phonetic compound reading task (P=0.04), with no significant difference when comparing regular with irregular words, or S-P words with pictographic words. Furthermore, error analysis showed that Chinese speakers exhibit orthographic dyslexia (e.g., read “因 ” as “困” ) in addition to regularization errors, especially in svPPA individuals. Unlike English speaking lvPPA individuals, Chinese speaking lvPPA do not exhibit impairments in reading SP compound pseudowords based on their phonetic radicals.
Conclusion. Dyslexia characteristics of Chinese speaking PPA individuals differ from that of English speakers.
Acknowledgements
Global Brain Health Institute, Alzheimer's Association, Atlantic Philanthropies, Buddhist Tzu-Chi Hospital, National Taiwan University, University of California, San Francisco, National TsingHua University (Taiwan), The Education University of Hong Kong, Shatin Hospital, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Keywords:
primary progressive aphasia,
Dyslexia,
Chinese,
Dementia,
reading impairment
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting, Macau, Macao, SAR China, 27 Oct - 29 Oct, 2019.
Presentation Type:
Poster presentation
Topic:
Not eligible for student award
Citation:
Tee
B,
Gorno-Tempini
M and
Kwan Chen
L
(2019). Dyslexia presentation in Chinese speaking Primary Progressive Aphasia individuals.
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia 57th Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2019.01.00095
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Received:
07 May 2019;
Published Online:
09 Oct 2019.
*
Correspondence:
Mx. Boon Lead Tee, Global Brain Health Institute, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, boonlead.tee@gbhi.org