Surface dyslexia in hebrew: A case study

We investigate the reading performance of a brain-damaged patient, JV, whose reading skills were abolished after trauma but regained four years later. Her reading is mainly nonlexical, so she may be classified as a case of surface dyslexia. JV is able to read nonwords and perform phonemic analysis. She is sensitive to word length but not frequency, word class, or concreteness. Errors are often incorrect vowel pronunciations. Homophones are confused and spelling errors tend to preserve phonology. JV also has difficulty with some of the distinctive features of Hebrew orthography, such as unvoweled homographs and morphological hermits. She is unable to learn logographic associations between visual symbols and spoken words. There is also an interesting dissociation between her poor reading and her well-preserved spelling, suggesting that tacit spelling knowledge may be spared in surface dyslexia caused by severe left-hemisphere lesion.