Developmental Surface Dyslexia in Italian

Abstract

Surface dyslexia is a reading disorder characterized by a disproportionate difficulty in reading irregular words, i.e. words for which the application of parsing procedures and phoneme assignment rules such as those proposed by Wijk (1966) and Venezky (1970) would yield incorrect phonological representations (cf. blood versus shampoo, pint versus pine). The errors produced by surface dyslexies when they try to read irregular words are often “regularization errors” (Marshall and Newcombe, 1973; Coltheart, Masterson, Byng, Prior, and Riddoch, in press), i.e. reading gauge as “gorge” and are as “air”. Stress placement errors on polysyllabic words are also observed, so that omit may be stressed on the first syllable (Marshall and Newccmbe, 1973) and recent may be read as “resent” (Holmes, 1978). Another type of error made by surface dyslexies concerns non-homographic homophones. Patients may in fact correctly read aloud a given homophone, but may be unable to assign it the correct meaning. For example, Newccmbe and Marshall (1981) report that the patient JC correctly read the noun bee, but glossed is as “To be or not to be, that is the question”.