ABSTRACT
In the original theoretical account of surface dyslexia, Marshall and Newcombe interpreted the disorder as arising from damage to the pathway between visual and semantic addresses. Models of reading of the kind proposed by Marshall and Newcombe and others postulate that there are two independent routes for reading alouda "direct" or "lexical" route and a rule-based non-lexical route. The chapter is concerned with the relationship between the young normal reader and the surface dyslexic. In order to determine how accurately skilled adult readers read these non-words, one needs first to determine what the correct response is for each non-word. In order to compare non-word reading across groups in a qualitative as well as a quantitative way, reading responses need to be categorised. Although evidence for the hypothesis is extremely scant, it seems to be the only one that can help to explain the results obtained in reading the same set of non-words by C.D., the developmental dyslexic.
