Abstract :
This study examined the effects of the age of acquisition (AOA) and semantic transparency on the
reading aloud ability of a Chinese dyslexic individual, TWT, who relied on the semantic pathway to
name characters. Both AOA and semantic transparency significantly predicted naming accuracy and
distinguished the occurrence of correct responses and semantic errors from other errors. A post hoc
analysis of subsets of items orthogonally varied in the AOA and semantic transparency revealed an
interaction between the two variables. These findings converge on reports of AOA and semantic effects
on deep dyslexic individuals reading alphabetic scripts. The case of TWT, together with recent results
of another Chinese dyslexic individual who reads via the nonsemantic route and exhibits the effects of
AOA and phonological consistency, supports the arbitrary mapping hypothesis, which states that the
AOA effect resides in the connection between two levels of representation.
