The Dual-Road Theory

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The dual-route theory is a pivotal concept to aid in the understanding of the specific deficits patient LHD suffered from. The dual-route theory of reading consists of two pathways that are able to grasp orthographic inputs and produce phonological outputs. These two pathways are called the lexical and sub-lexical route. The two pathways are similar in that they commence with the visual perception of the word. This process is then followed by the letter recognition process of understanding what each letter means individually. After this initial process, the word is processed lexically or sub-lexically. The lexical route is used when the word observed is recognized and is stored as knowledge due to sight. This route is comprised of the semantic…show more content…
As mentioned, her visual perception is obstructed by her blindness in the right visual field. This explains why she is capable of reading the beginning of the word, which lies in her left visual field and fails to read the end of the word, which lies in her right visual field. The outcome of her reading the words usually results in words that simply do not exist. This occurs because her perception of the words leads her to read them incorrectly. The deficits are difficult to pin down using the frequency and regularity data because the data disparity is so insignificant. LHD performed pretty similarly no matter the frequency or regularity of the word. The fact however that the number of regular words correct isn’t significantly higher in comparison to the other words indicates some form of a reading deficit. For the reading words aloud vs naming orally spelled words, the deficits argued are very evident. LHD performed significantly better when it came to naming orally spelled words in comparison to reading the words aloud. The reason this occurred is due to visual perception not being a necessity for the naming of orally spelled words. In contrast, when she is asked to read words aloud, she is required to use her visual perception, thus leading to the poorer results. LHD’s spelling performance coincides with her orthographical output deficit due to her…show more content…
The first task would be a string of letters either forming sensical or nonsensical words. She would be given fifty of these, one at a time on a piece of paper, and asked to read aloud the letters of the word. A poor performance would prove the deficit in visual perception to be true because she would expectedly be incapable of getting the letters in her right visual field correctly. However, if she were to successfully name all the letters, it would indicate that the visual perception is not the issue and that it lies somewhere else. Another task to test her deficit would be to allow her to watch a five second video with subtitles. Then, immediately following the video, play it once more without subtitles. Then, ask her to spell a word from the video that you give orally that was present in the beginning of a subtitle vs the end of a subtitle. She would be expected to perhaps do well on a word from the beginning of a subtitle due to her visual perception being intact on the left visual side thus the orthographical output may not really come in to play here due to the possibility of priming from the subtitles. However, she would be expected to fail on the end of a subtitle because her right visual field is obstructed meaning her visual perception would be of no assistance. This would require complete orthographical output when it comes to the spelling, which she would more than

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