Word and picture naming in adult dyslexia in a transparent orthography: evidence from Turkish.

The aim of the study is to explore the role of age of acquisition in word and picture naming in adult dyslexia in Turkish which is characterised by an entirely transparent orthography. Although it has previously been established that early acquired pictures and words are named faster than late acquired pictures and words in normal reading, this is the first report to investigate whether AoA has the same impact on adult dyslexic naming in Turkish. Independent ratings were obtained for AoA, frequency, name agreement and object familiarity in Turkish for all items in the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) line drawing set. Dyslexic (N=15) and nondyslexic (N=15) university undergraduates were asked to name 30 early acquired and 30 late acquired pictures and picture names standardised and selected from these norms. As predicted there were main effects for a) AoA with RTs for Early items named faster than Late items b) reader status with nondyslexic students faster than dyslexic students and c) stimuli types with pictures named slower than words. A two-way interaction between reader status and stimuli type was also significant. Implications of the results for other transparent orthographies and theoretical frameworks are discussed