Rational adaptation (RA) theories argue that people differ in how heavily they rely on knowledge about language versus event likelihood when they understand sentences depending on which type of knowledge is more reliable for them. Findings from multiple paradigms hint that, in language tasks, people with aphasia (PWA) rely more on world knowledge than neurologically healthy controls do. We tested rational adaptation theories in PWA using a visual world eye-tracking study of sentence comprehension. Both PWA and healthy controls showed similarly strong influences of world knowledge and verb constraints, with a slight delay in PWA, contrary to predictions of RA theories. Additionally, PWA showed more interference from a semantically-related distractor. These findings together do not provide clear evidence in favour of RA theories' predictions, but are consistent with models suggesting that impaired control mechanisms may play a role in language processing deficits in aphasia.
Pure alexia (PA) is an isolated reading impairment following brain damage, yet the mechanisms underlying reading recovery remain unclear. We present a Korean patient with PA following a posterior cerebral artery infarction who showed severe impairment in Hangul reading despite preserved writing and spoken language, with substantial recovery of sentence-level reading within six months. Structural and functional connectivity were investigated using diffusion tensor tractography (DTT) and functional connectivity (FC) analyses. DTT revealed degeneration of affected white matter tracts, including the forceps major, inferior longitudinal fasciculus and inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus. Interhemispheric FC was significantly lower than that of healthy controls (HCs) across perilesional regions. In contrast, FC between the left angular gyrus and perilesional regions differed significantly from HCs at specific follow-up time points during behavioral recovery. These findings suggest that functional reorganization of distributed reading networks may support behavioral recovery despite persistent structural disconnection.
This study examined the temporal dynamics of lexical and sublexical processing in Chinese spelling-to-dictation using two ERP experiments. Participants either wrote the initial character of two-character disyllabic words dictated to them (Experiment 1) or performed an auditory lexical decision task (Experiment 2), with character frequency (CF) and regularity manipulated. Results showed consistent CF effects in the N2 and late N400 windows across tasks, indicating shared lexical access and lexical competition processes. Crucially, CF-by-regularity interactions emerged only in spelling-to-dictation within the P2 and P3 intervals, suggesting processes specific to orthographic production. The P2 interaction may reflect early modulation of lexical activation by sublexical syllable-to-phonetic radical mappings, whereas the P3 interaction suggests enhanced orthographic encoding and response preparation when lexical and sublexical orthographic outputs converge. These findings support an interactive dual-route account of spelling and highlight how the Chinese writing system shapes the time course of written word production.
This study investigated mechanisms underlying oral reading of two-character kanji nonwords in Japanese. Unlike alphabetic orthographies, kanji does not permit straightforward grapheme-to-phoneme conversion because individual characters often have multiple readings whose typicality varies across lexical and positional contexts. We compared a lexical-only account with an account in which lexical processing is supplemented by character-based sublexical processing. Twenty-one Japanese-speaking persons with aphasia and 24 healthy controls read aloud two-character kanji words, pseudohomophone nonwords (PSH), and non-pseudohomophone nonwords (NPSH). In persons with aphasia, PSH accuracy exceeded NPSH accuracy but remained below word reading accuracy. Errors included legitimate alternative reading of components (LARC)-type responses, lexicalizations, and phonological nonword errors. Model-informed classification identified phonological dyslexia, surface dyslexia, mixed patterns, and unclassifiable cases. The findings suggest that kanji nonword reading depends on interactions between whole-word lexical activation and character-based candidate reading processes, supporting a dual-route account adapted to the specific properties of Japanese kanji.
