A Case of Phono logical Dyslexia in Spanish

Abstract

A case study of a Spanish-speaking patient w ith spared lexical reading and considerable difficulty reading nonwords is presented in this paper. A D suffered a CVA, and three m onths later w as adm inistered several tests of the Spanish version of PALPA. Although his word reading was around 90% correct, non word reading reached only 34% correct, non-word - non-word substitutions being the most frequent type of error. In word reading no effects of frequency, grammatical class, or imageability were found. Word recognition and comprehension were within the normal range, as were speech production and repetition. A series of tasks, developed to investigate the processes hypothesised to be involved in the nonlexical route, showed that the only problem was in phoneme assembly. The implications of this pattern of results in a reader of an orthographically-transparent language are discussed with regard to current models of oral reading.