Foop is still floop: A six year follow-up of phonological dyslexia and dysgraphia

Abstract

A six year follow-up of a previously documented case of developmental phonological dyslexia, is reported. Overal reading and spelling levels have risen significantly, but the qualitative nature of the performance has remained unchanged: impaired non-word reading; morphological and visuo-semantic paralexias; and function word substitutions in text. Rhyming skills also remain impaired. A higher proportion of errors are paralexias and within these a higher proportion are visuo-semantic or morphological. The error pattern of phonological dylexia is thus more pronounced than before. In spelling, only a minority of errors are phonologically plausible. There is no evidence of the mastery of the alphabetic “stage” of reading or the alphabetic “stage” of spelling. It is argued that A.H. is reading orthographically not logographically and that current reading models, which require passage through an alphabetic “stage” before attaining an orthographic stage, do not adequately account for individual variation in the acquisition of literacy skills.