ABSTRACT
The symptom of surface dyslexia that has attracted most theoretical interest so far is a selective difficulty in the reading aloud of words with irregular relationships of spelling to sound. Poorer performance with irregular than with regular words, and the occurrence of regularisation errors, are central to the description of surface dyslexia. Both symptoms depend on the presentation of irregular words to the patient. The spelling system of Spanish is perfectly regular; that is, there exists a system of spelling–sound rules that correctly describes the pronunciation of all written words in Spanish, and so no irregular words exist. F.E. comes from a middle-class family who live in Colombia, South America, and who are Spanish-speaking. F.E. was born and lived in Colombia until the age of 18, when he came to England. One hundred pairs of homophones were selected, plus a spoken definition of one member of each pair of homophones.
