TY - JOUR

T1 - Acquired dyslexia in Spanish

T2 - a review and some observations on a new case of deep dyslexia

AU - Davies, Robert

AU - Cuetos, Fernando

PY - 2005

Y1 - 2005

N2 - Readers and writers of Spanish use an orthography that is highly transparent. It has been proposed that readers of Spanish can rely on grapheme-phoneme correspondences, alone, to access meaning or phonology from print. In recent years, a number of case studies have yielded evidence inconsistent with this idea. We review these studies with particular focus on those that report evidence for reading based on direct lexical mappings between print, orthographic representations, and meaning or phonology. We report a new case of acquired literacy impairment in Spanish, MJ, who presents a pattern of preserved abilities and deficits symptomatic of deep dyslexia. The patient is unable to read nonwords, but can read a substantial number of words. Her reading is characterized by the production of semantic, visual, and derivational errors. We argue that MJ has a deficit in her lexical selection ability, common to both her reading and her naming problems. We propose that MJ, and the other cases we review, demonstrate that lexical reading is adopted by skilled readers even in a transparent language.

AB - Readers and writers of Spanish use an orthography that is highly transparent. It has been proposed that readers of Spanish can rely on grapheme-phoneme correspondences, alone, to access meaning or phonology from print. In recent years, a number of case studies have yielded evidence inconsistent with this idea. We review these studies with particular focus on those that report evidence for reading based on direct lexical mappings between print, orthographic representations, and meaning or phonology. We report a new case of acquired literacy impairment in Spanish, MJ, who presents a pattern of preserved abilities and deficits symptomatic of deep dyslexia. The patient is unable to read nonwords, but can read a substantial number of words. Her reading is characterized by the production of semantic, visual, and derivational errors. We argue that MJ has a deficit in her lexical selection ability, common to both her reading and her naming problems. We propose that MJ, and the other cases we review, demonstrate that lexical reading is adopted by skilled readers even in a transparent language.

KW - dyslexia

KW - deep dyslexia

KW - phonological dyslexia

KW - lexical

KW - grapheme

KW - phoneme

KW - Spanish

KW - WORD INTERFERENCE PARADIGM

KW - PHONOLOGICAL ALEXIA

KW - SEMANTIC PARALEXIAS

KW - SET SIZE

KW - ERRORS

KW - RECOGNITION

KW - ORTHOGRAPHY

KW - REPETITION

KW - CONTINUUM

KW - LANGUAGE

M3 - Literature review

VL - 16

SP - 85

EP - 101

JO - Behavioural Neurology

JF - Behavioural Neurology

SN - 0953-4180

IS - 2-3

ER -