Surface dyslexia in a child with epilepsy.

N.G. is a 13-year-old boy with surface dyslexia. He is significantly better at reading aloud words with regular spelling-to-sound patterns than those with irregular. He displays homophone confusion. N.G.'s case is particularly pure since he makes no invalid/visual errors. All errors are strictly rule-governed. Even long unfamiliar words are read with good accuracy. Both aural and reading comprehension are severely impaired. It is concluded that by age 13, an isolated and efficient system of phonic reading may develop which is based on grapheme-phoneme conversion or on graphemic chunks converted to phonological segments.