Recognition of Nonwords in Two Patients with Deep Dyslexia: Implications for Models of Reading

Abstract

Deep dyslexia is an acquired reading disorder characterized by poor oral reading of nonwords, as well as by semantic, derivational, visual, and function word errors. Traditional explanations of the disorder assume that patients’ difficulties in reading aloud nonwords reflect an inability to process phonology. Although recent studies have shown that some deep dyslexics implicitly process phonology, current accounts of the disorder do not allow for explicit phonological processing. Using a forced-choice memory task, we investigated the explicit phonological processing of two deep dyslexic patients to determine if such processing occurs. During familiarization, the patients were presented a series of target nonwords. During recognition, they saw each target paired with a foil nonword, and they were asked to point to the target. Each patient earned a perfect score on this task. In addition, one patient performed well on a similar task presented in the auditory domain. These findings demonstrate explicit phonological processing in at least two deep dyslexics, requiring a re-examination of explanations of the disorder.