The Other Dyslexias

Abstract

This chapter will deal with phonological dyslexia and the other acquired dyslexias such as neglect, visual, and attentional dyslexia considered as the “peripheral” types of acquired dyslexia. Of these phonological dyslexia is considered as being among the more important subtypes of acquired dyslexia. It has received considerable attention and has been documented fairly extensively in alphabetic scripts like English and French. We have not had occasion to test and document a phonological dyslexic as yet. Nor have we seen many reports on phonological dyslexia in other nonalphabetic scripts. Phonological dyslexia, in our opinion is unlikely to occur in the more transparent scripts, given that it is identified by the patient’s inability to read non- words in particular and theoretically at least a patient who can read words in a transparent orthography should be able to read non-words in the same orthography. A second reason for the relative paucity of reports on phonological dyslexia could be that it is not apparent unless the patient is specifically tested with non-words, which may not happen often in clinical setups. Nevertheless a specific disability in non-word reading with intact reading of words (both regular and irregular) may be dependent/related to the nature of the orthography to a far greater extent than the other major types of acquired dyslexia. To our knowledge there are not many reports of phonological dyslexia in the transparent writing systems with a couple of recent exceptions, which will be discussed below, rather than being presented in a separate chapter.