Phonological Reading: Phenomena and Paradoxes

A single case study of a patient with an acquired dyslexia, KT, found that his performance on visual lexical processing tasks was very satisfactory, there was no effect of priming from a correctly read irregular word and his reading of polysyllabic words was remarkably good.

Abstract

We report a single case study of a patient with an acquired dyslexia. KT had no difficulty in reading regular words and non-words at a normal speed, but he made numerous errors in reading irregular words. These were characterised by "regularisation" of the letter string. We have documented his residual reading abilities and in addition have investigated other aspects of his residual reading skills. We found that his performance on visual lexical processing tasks was very satisfactory, there was no effect of priming from a correctly read irregular word and his reading of polysyllabic words was remarkably good. In particular his assignment of word stress was usually accurate. We consider our findings in relation to current models of phonological reading and conclude that they provide further evidence for a multiple levels computation of the transcoding between print and phonology.