[1][2] According to Marshall & Newcombe's (1973) and McCarthy & Warrington's study (1990), patients with this kind of disorder cannot recognize a word as a whole due to the damage of the left parietal or temporal lobe.
According to the dual route theory of reading, in individuals with surface dyslexia, the indirect (non-lexical) pathway is preserved.
The absence of an intact direct pathway of reading leads individuals with surface dyslexia to incorrectly identify and pronounce irregular words.
Case studies conducted by Law and Cupples (2015) recommend first identifying specific oral reading difficulties experienced by the individual with surface dyslexia and based on the reading patterns identified designing a theoretically motivated and targeted treatment program.
One of the interventions involved targeting visual-orthographic processing by increasing the efficiency by which surface dyslexics identified nonwords.