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This study investigates differences in the word processing skills of students with and without reading difficulties who read Turkish, an entirely transparent orthography. Thirty-five students diagnosed as poor readers and 51 typically developing controls were tested across two experiments, one that assessed their ability to process identicalness of isolated real words as opposed to pseudowords and another that assessed their ability to judge semantic relatedness of two real words. Participants were from two education levels; half of them were 3rd-4th graders and half were 6th-7th graders. An integrative view of the findings points to an apparent failure of Turkish poor readers to develop a lexicalized reading route that mediates word recognition by means of permanent orthographic knowledge. Moreover, their ability to effectively process word letter sequences along a non-lexical grapheme-to-phoneme conversion-based reading route was found to be seriously restricted. Findings are discussed with direct reference to orthographic transparency, dual-route reading theory and the orthographic self-teaching concept.

This study investigates differences in the word processing skills of students with andwithout reading difficulties who read Turkish, an entirely transparent orthography. Thirty-five students diagnosed as poor readers and 51 typically developing controls were testedacross two experiments, one that assessed theirability to process identicalness of isolatedreal words as opposed to pseudowords and another that assessed their ability to judgesemantic relatedness of two real words. Participants were from two education levels; halfof them were 3rd-4th graders and half were 6th–7th graders. An integrative view of thefindings points to an apparent failure of Turkish poor readers to develop a lexicalizedreading route that mediates word recognition by means of permanent orthographicknowledge. Moreover, their ability to effectively process word letter sequences along anon-lexical grapheme-to-phoneme conversion-based reading route was found to beseriously restricted. Findings are discussed with direct reference to orthographic transpar-ency, dual-route reading theory and the orthographic self-teaching concept.

Deep dysgraphic patients make semantic errors when writing to dictation and they cannot write nonwords. Extant reports of deep dysgraphia come from languages with relatively opaque orthographies. Turkish is a transparent orthography because the bidirectional mappings between phonology and orthography are completely predictable. We report BRB, a biscriptal Turkish-English speaker who has acquired dysgraphia characterised by semantic errors as well as effects of grammatical class and imageability on writing in Turkish. Nonword spelling is abolished. A similar pattern of errors is observed in English. BRB is the first report of acquired dysgraphia in a truly transparent writing system. We argue that deep dysgraphia results from damage to the mappings that are common to both languages between word meanings and orthographic representations.