Surface dyslexia

Surface dyslexia is one type of Alexia (acquired dyslexia) that patients have a reading disorder.

According to Marshall & Newcombe's (1973) and McCarthy & Warrington's study (1990), this kind of disorder is that patients cannot recognize the word as a whole due to the damage of the left parietal or temporal lobe. This means they will make mistakes once the visual appearance—the spelling—of the word is not in accordance with the pronunciation rules. But there no difficulty in the understanding of the meaning of the word; so, they could still understand the meaning of the word without pronounce them correctly.

Thus, patients can read the word with regular spelling and pronounce them according to pronunciation rules such as table, tape, taste. Also, they can sound out the pronounceable non-words, like glab, trisk, chint. But they will read those irregular spelling words in the wrong way, for example: instead of reading sew, pint, and yacht, they will read like sue, pinnt, and yatchet.