Surface dyslexia

Surface dyslexia is a type of dyslexia, a reading disorder, in which a person cannot recognize a word as a whole and retrieve its pronunciation from memory. The article attributes the pattern, citing studies by Marshall and Newcombe in 1973 and McCarthy and Warrington in 1990, to damage in the left parietal or temporal lobe. People with surface dyslexia rely instead on pronunciation rules, so they read non-words such as yatchet fluently and read regular words such as mint correctly, yet struggle with exception words that defy the rules, such as pint. Semantic knowledge is often preserved. The contrast between regular and exception words is what distinguishes this form of acquired reading disorder.