Reading disorder characterized by a selective impairment of reading aloud nonwords, which co-exists with the relatively intact reading of words. Reading disorder characterized by severe or even total impairments in the decoding of print to sound, that is the ability to assign pronunciation to unfamiliar letter strings (e.g. nonwords such as RINT), and accuracy in real word naming, which is unaffected by spelling-sound characteristics of the word.
He was able to repeat words and nonsense syllables. Oral reading of words was 95% correct (with nonspecific residual errors), but nonword reading was disturbed (20% correct) and oral reading of isolated letters was impossible. The patient thus presented a relatively pure pattern of "phonological dyslexia" (see Beauvois and Dérouesné, 1979; Funnell, 1983) with preserved lexical decision and semantic comprehension of written words. Assessment of writing to dictation showed that the patient could not write by phoneme-to-grapheme transcoding (13% correct for nonwords). His writing of words was dramatically sensitive to length but was not influenced by any other variables such as regularity, concreteness or word class.