The interaction between semantic and non-semantic systems in reading: Evidence from Chinese

We report a Chinese-speaking dementia patient with left temporal lobe ischemic damage, WJX, who showed impaired semantic system functioning with a relatively well preserved ability to read aloud Chinese characters including characters with unpredictable mappings between orthography and phonology - so called irregular characters. We compared his comprehension and reading performance by using characters varying in the transparency of phonetic radicals and semantic radicals and observed an interaction between his comprehension and the orthography-phonology consistency of the phonetic radical on reading performance. Furthermore, the transparency of semantic radicals was found to have little effect on comprehension performance. We argue that this case report provides converging evidence for the principles of the summation hypothesis for reading.