KJ: A developmental deep dyslexic

Abstract

Abstract We describe the case of KJ, a 13-year-old girl with a reading age of 6 years 2 months, who makes semantic errors in single-word reading. In the corpus of errors collected, 24% of her substitution errors were semantically related to their targets. Like adult-acquired deep dyslexics, KJ also makes visual, morphological, and visual and/or semantic errors, and is completely unable to read even the simplest nonwords. She also makes semantic errors in speech production and comprehension. Her reading processes are examined in the context of dual-route models. We also describe training experiments investigating the effects of imageability/word class and of orthographic transformations and mismatches between orthography and phonology on KJ's ability to read aloud single words, and a study comparing two therapeutic interventions. We suggest that the case of KJ provides a convincing example of developmental deep dyslexia.