Atypical cognitive disorders in a man with developmental surface dyslexia

The neuropsychological profile of a man with a developmental surface dyslex ia is presented here. This case study is of interest because J.C. exhibited a pattern of cognitive disorders rarely documented in previous data. Resul ts showed that JC's difficulties in reading comprehension were closely I re lated to complex memory disorders and were also associated with cognitive s lowness. The present observations do not support the visual memory failure hypothesis. The data rather suggest that the core difficulty primarily lies with the nonautomatization of grapheme-phoneme me correspondence rules, wh ich in turn dramatically contributed to lexicon weaknesses. The hypothesis of a timing mechanism in reading disorders is discussed. (C) 2000 Academic Press.