Deep Dyslexia - Signs and Symptoms

Signs and Symptoms

Deep dyslexia is mainly characterized by the occurrence of semantic reading errors or semantic paralexias (transposition of letters or words) when reading aloud (e.g. view → read as “scene“, bird → read as “canary”). These semantic errors are the major distinguishing feature of deep dyslexia in comparison to other central dyslexias. Other characteristics of deep dyslexia include visual errors (e.g. thing → read as “think”, skate → read as “scale”) and deviational errors (e.g. alcohol → read as "alcoholic", governor → read as "government") as well as poor reading of function words, more difficulty reading abstract than concrete and highly imaginable words, more difficulty reading adjectives, adverbs, and verbs than nouns, a complete inability to read non-words, and often impairments on tasks of verbal working memory.

While the symptoms of deep dyslexia listed above are different and independent impairments of reading, it is rare to find an individual who only displays some of the characteristics of it; indeed, most patients presenting with semantic paralexias, a hallmark symptom of the disorder, also demonstrate all of the other symptoms. This has resulted in deep dyslexia being considered a symptom-complex and has led to much research into why this variety of symptoms may co-occur in so many patients.