Lexical Access Viewed from the Information Processing Approach: Reading and Writing (Data from Pathology)

Over the past fifteen years there was a renewal of approaches in order to explain how we proceed from print to meaning and/or from print to oral output. After Marshall and Newcombe’s (1973) observations, research on acquired reading disorders indeed became a question of theoretical concern. Deep dyslexia and surface dyslexia —both originally described as patterns of reading errors — have played an important role for the description of the reading processes since it is largely agreed upon that the performance of neurological patients can reveal separable subsystems of normal function rather than document the substitution of one subsystem for another (c.f. Shallice, 1979).