Evaluation of Lexically and Nonlexically Based Reading Treatment in a Deep Dyslexic

The aim of the single case study was to evaluate two different treatment procedures to improve reading skills with a German-speaking deep dyslexic. Generally, in treatment studies for deep dyslexia, retraining of grapheme-phoneme correspondences is described, but hardly any treatment focuses on reactivating residual functions of the semantic-lexical route. This strategy was explored here with an experimentally presented priming paradigm, to implicitly strengthen residual skills of lexical access with semantically/phonologically related primes (lexically based treatment). In contrast, grapheme-phoneme associations and blending were explicitly relearned during a nonlexically based treatment. Stimuli were controlled for part of speech, word length, and frequency. A cross-over design to identify item- and treatment-specific effects for both procedures was applied. Results indicate positive outcomes with respect to treatment-specific effects for both procedures, generalization to untrained items, and a transfer task after the nonlexically based procedure. All effects remained stable in the follow-up assessment. Implications for theoretically/empirically generated expectations about treatment outcomes are discussed.