Dual-route hypothesis to reading aloud

[1][4][5] This mechanism can be thought of as a letter-sound rule system that allows the reader to actively build a phonological representation and read the word aloud.

This difference explains why it takes more time for children to learn to read English, due to its frequent irregular orthography, compared to French and Spanish.

Similarly, Spanish surface dyslexics exhibit less impairment in reading overall, because they can rely upon consistent pronunciation rules instead of processing many exception words as a whole in the internal lexicon.

[8] When an irregular word is presented, both the lexical and nonlexical pathways are activated but they generate conflicting information that takes time to be resolved.

[8] This data further explains why regular words, that both follow spelling-sound rules and have been stored in long-term memory, are read faster since both pathways "agree" about the issue of pronunciation.

[8] The nonlexical pathway is thought to be more active and constructive as it assembles and selects the correct subword units from various potential combinations.

It engages in controlled processing and thus requires more attentional capacities, which can vary in amount depending on the complexity of the words being assembled.

[8] On the other hand, the processing that takes place in the lexical pathway appears to be more automatic, since the word-sound units in it are pre-assembled.

[10] Surface dyslexia, first described by Marshall and Newcombe, is characterized by the inability to read words that do not follow traditional pronunciation rules.

English is also an example of a language that has numerous exceptions to the rules of pronunciation and thus presents a particular challenge to those with surface dyslexia.

Patients with surface dyslexia may fail to read such words as "yacht", or "island" for example, because they do not follow prescribed rules of pronunciation.

[12] The mechanism behind surface dyslexia is thought to be involved with the phonologic output of the lexicon and is also often attributed to the disruption of semantics.

However, patients with this disability can holistically read and correctly pronounce words, regardless of length, meaning, or how common they are, as long as they are stored in memory.

[6] Phonological dyslexia was similarly modeled by selectively damaging the non-lexical route thereby causing the program to mispronounce non words.