Lexical capture: a developmental disorder of reading and spelling

We report a case of a 35-year-old teacher, Louise, with a history of learning difficulties and current evidence of developmental phonological dyslexia and dysgraphia. Her reading, spelling, and remembering of novel stimuli written in conventional alphabetic script was poor, but she performed significantly better when the same items were written in the International Phonetic Alphabet, a system that she learned when studying linguistics. Her impaired performance in tasks of phonemic segmentation and short-term memory, which are generally associated with impaired reading and spelling of unfamiliar material, could not account for her specific difficulty with alphabetic stimuli. Instead, her problems appear to result from a lexical strategy, which we have called "lexical capture".