Although anecdotal reports of loss of once-acquired reading ability was
noticed in the individuals who had sustained brain damage as early as
the year AD. 30, systematic enquires of alexia were not undertaken until
the latter part of the nineteenth century. The two anatomo-pathological
studies carried out by Dejerine in 1891 and 1892 mark the beginning of
scholarly investigation of reading failure. Interestingly, the study of
de- velopmental reading disability also began to receive attention at
about the same time when Pringle Morgan described the case of a
14-year-old boy who had great difficulty in reading and writing. Since
then sporadic reports of developmental reading-writing failure began to
appear in medi- cal and educational journals even though such
investigation went on at an unhurried pace. In the past two decades,
however, the situation has changed enormously and hundreds of articles
that have investigated developmental and acquired cognitive disabilities
have been published. Disorders of spoken language and written language
are two areas that have been extensively addressed by these articles.
Those who study disorders of language come from a wide variety of
backgrounds and their reports are also published in a variety of
journals. The purpose of the present volume is to bring some important
research findings of written language disorders together and present
them in a coherent format. In Chapter 1, Joshi and Aaron challenge the
validity of the notion of the putative "poor speller but good reader'.