Cognitive correlates of developmental surface dyslexia

Recently, there have been several reports of developmental analogues of the specific orthographic processing deficits observed in acquired surface dyslexics (Goulandris & Snowling, 1991; Hanley, Hastie, & Kay, 1992). However, very little has been discovered about what basic cognitive deficits might be associated with this particular kind of reading disorder. This paper describes the case of MI, a 10-year-old boy with a high IQ and no known history of neurological impairment. He demonstrates extremely poor performance for his age and reading level on irregular word reading tasks, but performs normally on nonword and regular word tasks. His performance on a series of homophone selection tasks suggests an impairment at the orthographic input level. The results of various tests of associated cognitive abilities conducted on MI suggest that this impairment is not associated either with phonological awareness deficits or with the visual memory problems proposed by Goulandris and Snowling (1991).