Abstract
Roderick was a 15 year old pupil at a London private school with high academic standards when a teacher asked me to see if he was dyslexic. He feared that Roderick might fail some of his pending O-level examinations, even though he was sure that the boy was very bright. Expecting a classic case of specific reading failure, I was very surprised when on the first test I administered, the Schonell Graded Word Reading Test, Roderick performed near ceiling level. In other reading tests too he showed the competence of an adult fluent reader. I quickly found out that he never had a reading problem, had learned to read very early, and was in fact an avid and very fast reader. When I queried him further it became clear that his only problem was spelling but that it was a very serious handicap. Roderick was the first case of specific spelling failure that I had come across and set me off on a long search to find out how it is possible to be unable to spell the same words that one is easily able to recognize when reading. The existence of excellent readers who are atrocious spellers challenges sane implicitly held assumptions about reading and writing. How can there be a dissociation of such closely related skills as recognizing and reproducing a written word? Should these two processes not be two sides of the same coin?
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© 1984 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague
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Frith, U. (1984). Specific Spelling Problems. In: Malatesha, R.N., Whitaker, H.A. (eds) Dyslexia: A Global Issue. NATO ASI Series, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6929-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6929-2_4
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