title: Deep dyslexia in childhood?
abstract: Deep dyslexia is an acquired reading disorder in which semantic substitutions (e.g., city read as town) are made in reading single isolated words. In this paper, evidence for deep dyslexic-type errors is presented from the word-recognition responses of six children, aged 7 years and 0 month to 8 years and 9 months, with severe reading disorders. These semantic substitutions occur in the absence of phonological skills. Therefore, it appears that there exists a small subset of developmental dyslexics who at the beginning of acquisition of reading skills are able to engage in semantic processing, but who show severe impairment of phonological processing. The existence of these reading errors indicate that the use of a phonological code is not necessary to extract meaning from the printed word.
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D004411:Dyslexia, Acquired / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014796:Visual Perception