Applying Cognitive Neuropsychological Principles to the Rehabilitation of Spanish Readers with Acquired Dyslexia

ABSTRACT

Cognitive neuropsychological models (CNMs) have been useful to generate a theory of aphasia rehabilitation. In contrast to the traditional syndrome approach, CNMs employ cognitive accounts to interpret language disturbances after brain damage. In this article, we apply CNMs to monolingual Spanish and bilingual Spanish-English readers with acquired dyslexia whose first language is Spanish. Although there are many studies of acquired dyslexia (reading errors associated with aphasia), they primarily have focused on English and French readers. Similar investigations on Spanish readers are limited. Unlike the opaque orthographic systems of English and French (inconsistent grapheme-to-phoneme relationships), Spanish has a mostly transparent orthography (regular grapheme-to-phoneme relationships). Thus evaluating and treating dyslexia secondary to brain damage in Spanish readers may involve different strategies from those employed with English and French readers. The increasingly large numbers of Spanish speakers in aphasia rehabilitation worldwide underscore the critical need to develop plausible theoretically grounded clinical strategies to serve these individuals.

Cognitive neuropsychology - acquired dyslexias - Spanish - rehabilitation

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