Training phonological reading in deep alexia: does it improve reading words with low imageability?

The purpose of this study was to examine whether training phonological reading using a bigraph-syllable pairing method (e.g. pa - /pae/) instead of grapheme-phoneme pairing (e.g. p - /p/, a - /ae/) resulted in improved reading of words with low imageability and paragraphs in an individual with deep alexia. In the treatment, Friedman and Lott's bigraph-syllable correspondence (e.g. fa - /fae/) training procedure was adapted and used. The results indicated that the treatment effect generalized to the reading of words with low imageability, which was not reported in most previous studies. Oral reading accuracy and comprehension accuracy of paragraphs also improved. It is suggested that bigraph-syllable correspondence training is effective in improving low imageability word reading, possibly because it can provide more substantial phonemic cues necessary to read words with low imageability (which have limited semantic information associated with them) than the grapheme-phoneme correspondence training method.