Do deep dyslexia, dysphasia and dysgraphia share a common phonological impairment?
This study directly compared four patients who, to varying degrees, showed the characteristics of deep dyslexia, dysphasia and/or dysgraphia–i.e., they made semantic errors in oral reading, repetition and/or spelling to dictation. The “primary systems” hypothesis proposes that these different conditions result from severe impairment to a common phonological system, rather than damage to task-specific mechanisms (i.e. grapheme-phoneme conversion). By this view, deep dyslexic/dysphasic patients should show overlapping deficits but previous studies have not directly compared them. All four patients in the current study showed poor phonological production across different tasks, including repetition, reading aloud and spoken picture naming, in line with the primary systems hypothesis. They also showed severe deficits in tasks that required the manipulation of phonology, such as phoneme addition and deletion. Some of the characteristics of the deep syndromes – namely lexicality and imageab
