Skilled reading with impaired phonology: A case study

This paper describes the case of a young woman who is an above average reading comprehender despite deficient phonological processing and phonological memory. She has not developed a reliable or readily accessible set of associations between graphemes and phonemes, and is extremely poor at nonword reading and spelling. We found that, although she was well below average in reading aloud and spelling words, what she excelled at was orthographic processing in silent reading tasks. She was above average in efficiency in choosing the correctly spelt word of short word nonword pairs and in deciding on the lexical status of long words and nonwords, and her efficiency in performing lexical decisions on short word and nonword sequences was exceptional. These data suggest that impaired phonological processing capacity can be compensated for by the development of superior orthographic processing ability.