Deep dyslexia is a term used in cognitive neuropsychology to study deficits in which domain?

• A. Reading
• B. Writing
• C. Speaking
• D. Memory

Answer: (A)

Deep dyslexia refers to a reading impairment that emerges after brain injury and shows distinctive reading errors. The key feature is that patients often read words incorrectly in a way that preserves semantics, such as reading a word as a related word (semantic substitutions) and having trouble reading nonwords. This pattern highlights how reading relies on two processing routes: a lexical-semantic (whole-word) route and a non-lexical (phonological) route. In deep dyslexia, the disruption tends to affect the non-lexical route, causing a heavy reliance on the lexical route and producing semantic paralexias. Because the defining problems are centered on reading and decoding written language, this topic is about reading rather than writing, speaking, or memory.