Note: [] Corresponding author: Robert Davies, Facultad de Psicologia,
Plaza Feijoo, s/n, 33003 Oviedo, Spain. E-mail: robertdavies@uniovi.es
Abstract: Readers and writers of Spanish use an orthography that is highly
transparent. It has been proposed that readers of Spanish can rely on
grapheme-phoneme correspondences, alone, to access meaning or phonology from
print. In recent years, a number of case studies have yielded evidence
inconsistent with this idea. We review these studies with particular focus on
those that report evidence for reading based on direct lexical mappings between
print, orthographic representations, and meaning or phonology. We report a new
case of acquired literacy impairment in Spanish, MJ, who presents a pattern of
preserved abilities and deficits symptomatic of deep dyslexia. The patient is
unable to read nonwords, but can read a substantial number of words. Her
reading is characterized by the production of semantic, visual, and
derivational errors. We argue that MJ has a deficit in her lexical selection
ability, common to both her reading and her naming problems. We propose that
MJ, and the other cases we review, demonstrate that lexical reading is adopted
by skilled readers even in a transparent language.
Keywords: Dyslexia, deep dyslexia, phonological dyslexia, lexical, grapheme, phoneme, Spanish
