COGNITIVE CORRELATES OF DEVELOPMENTAL SURFACE DYSLEXIA - A SINGLE-CASE STUDY

Recently, there have been several reports of developmental analogues o f the specific orthographic processing deficits observed in acquired s urface dyslexics (Goulandris & Snowling, 1991; Hanley, Hastie, & Kay, 1992). However, very little has been discovered about what basic cogni tive 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 demonst rates extremely poor performance for his age and reading level on irre gular 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 sugge st that this impairment is not associated either with phonological awa reness deficits or with the visual memory problems proposed by Gouland ris and Snowling (1991).