ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part describes investigations of a language whose writing system does not permit the occurrence of irregular words, but does permit the occurrence of homophones and of phonological spelling errors, the language in question being Spanish. It illustrates the approach by pointing out that, in deep dyslexia, likelihood of a stimulus being read correctly depends on its semantic properties, its syntactic properties, and its lexical properties. However, S. U. made semantic errors in reading and writing of kanji. As comprehension of kanji was, however, also impaired, S. U. must have had, in addition to the output impairment, an impairment of access from kanji to semantics—a "semantic access dyslexia"—which would compromise comprehension of kanji and could generate semantic errors in oral reading. Correct stress assignment for all Italian polysyllabic words requires lexical access, and accordingly surface dyslexia in Italian can be revealed by stress errors in oral reading.
