Author: Gabriel Qi
For our first article of this month’s ANA Listserv Research Digest, Mindt, Byrd, Saez,
and Manly’s (2010) call to action is a good reminder for neuropsychologists to
continually expand culturally competent neuropsychological services for ethnic
minority populations. They provided a thorough review of the history, current
guidelines, practices, and training of neuropsychology when it comes to serving
ethnic minority populations. Strategies and resources for increasing such provisions
were also given.
On a more specific note, I want to bring to your attention a case report of a 44-year-old Chinese patient with semantic dementia, who demonstrated dyslexia and
dysgraphia (Wu et al., 2015). Patients with semantic dementia, whose native
languages are alphabetical ones, usually make phonologically plausible errors (PPEs)
such as “flood”→“flud”. However, this patient also made more orthographically
similar errors and noncharacter responses such as pictograph, logographeme, or
stroke errors, in addition to PPEs. The authors hypothesized that this unique profile
of dysgraphia may be attributable to the differences between the writing systems of
Chinese, a logographic language, and alphabetical languages. More details and
illustrations can be found in the article.
We would also like to potentially generate some discussion after the research digest,
so we’d like to attach an optional question each month. For this month, we want to
ask:
What unique manifestations of dysgraphia and dyslexia in other cultures/populations
have you learned of?
Here are the links to access the articles this month:
References:
• Rivera Mindt, M., Byrd, D., Saez, P., & Manly, J. (2010). Increasing culturally
competent neuropsychological services for ethnic minority populations: A call to
action. The Clinical Neuropsychologist, 24, 429-453.
doi:10.1080/13854040903058960.
• Wu, X.-Q., Liu, X.-J., Sun, Z.-C., Chromik, L., & Zhang, Y.-W. (2015). Characteristics of
dyslexia and dysgraphia in a Chinese patient with semantic dementia, Neurocase, 2,
279-288, doi:10.1080/13554794.2014.892621.