Further Evidence on the Effect of Word Imageability in Dyslexia

Abstract

Subjects with acquired dyslexia sometimes find abstract words more difficult to read than concrete words. Three dyslexic patients were found to show performance corrrelating with the imageability of the material, but not with its concreteness. This could not be explained in terms of lexical complexity; indeed, derived nouns were easier to read than simple nouns. These effects were reliable across the three subjects. It was suggested that they were naming imaginal representations of the referents of imageable nouns.