Developmental phonological dyslexia and dysgraphia in a regular orthography: a case study.

Abstract

In the Italian language the phoneme-to-grapheme mapping is fairly regular so that children are able to master very early reading and spelling skills. However, persisting phonological spelling deficits, were recently described in a sub-group of Italian dyslexic children with language delay. The study describes spelling and reading deficits of an Italian child suffering from phonological dyslexia and dysgraphia. As a comparison, a case of surface dyslexia and dysgraphia was reported. Quantitative and error analysis were performed on reading and spelling performance. Additionally the locus of the phonological deficit was examined by means of tasks requiring doubled consonants processing. Results showed a parallelism between the reading and the spelling impairments in both children. Phonological dyslexia and dysgraphia was characterized by worse pseudoword than word processing; lexicalizations in reading and a high rate of minimal distance misspellings. Concomitant deficits in phoneme manipulation and representation were disclosed. The surface profile was characterized by impaired performance on tasks with pseudo-homophones and stress errors in reading, and concomitant phonological plausible misspellings.