Not All Dyslexia Is the Same: A Guide to the Different Types of Dyslexia

This is the type most people have heard of. Phonological dyslexia affects the brain’s ability to decode new words by converting written letters into sounds (the “sounding it out” process).

What it looks like:

• Reading familiar words is relatively fine, but unfamiliar words and made-up words (like “blorf” or “wuffle”) are very difficult
• Learning new vocabulary from reading is slow
• May memorize words as whole visual shapes rather than decoding them

In English: The child reads “yacht” and “school” from memory but struggles with any unfamiliar word.

Phonological dyslexia is often the first type screened for — but it’s far from the only one.

Surface dyslexia is almost the opposite of phonological dyslexia. Here, the brain’s direct lookup of known words is impaired, forcing the reader to laboriously decode every word from scratch using letter-sound rules.

What it looks like:

• Reads regular, phonetically predictable words well
• Struggles with irregular words that break the rules (like “yacht,” “colonel,” or “Wednesday”)
• Over-regularizes: might read “have” as “hayve” or “done” as “doh-neh”

In English: The reader sounds everything out perfectly — until they hit an exception word. This type is common in languages with tricky spelling, like English and French.

Imagine reading “destiny” and seeing “density” — or reading “form” as “from.” That’s letter-position dyslexia in action. The reader identifies all the right letters, but their internal positions within the word get scrambled.

What it looks like:

• Frequent letter transpositions within words (especially middle letters)
• Anagram-type errors — reading “singe” as “signe,” or “from” as “form”
• Problems with words that contain doubled letters (like reading “bottle” as “botle”)
• Errors in both real words and nonsense words

The key detail: Unlike other types, the error isn’t about the sounds — the child knows the letters. The brain simply isn’t locking them into the correct positions. The Malabi study identified a French student with selective letter-position dyslexia — their only reading errors were these transpositions. Everything else was normal.

This is one of the less-known but fascinating types. In attentional dyslexia, the brain has trouble binding each letter to the specific word it belongs to. Letters seem to “migrate” between neighboring words.

What it looks like:

• Reading “win fed” as “fin wed” — a letter from one word lands in another
• Errors maintain the relative position of the letter (a first-letter migration stays a first letter in the new word)
• More errors when reading multiple words close together
• Usually reads single isolated words correctly

Why it’s easy to miss: Because isolated word reading is often intact, this type can be completely overlooked in standard testing. The Malabi study identified three French students with this pattern — none had been caught by traditional screening.

At the earliest visual stage of reading, the brain must convert shapes on a page into abstract letter identities. A breakdown here leads to letter identification dyslexia.

What it looks like:

• Confusing visually similar letters: p/q, b/d, l/i, n/m
• Errors at the single-letter level — difficulty naming or sounding out individual letters
• Can match letters of the same shape but struggles when the same letter appears in uppercase vs. lowercase (because the abstract identity is what’s impaired)

In neglect dyslexia, the reader consistently misreads letters on one side of the word — usually the left side (though right-side neglect exists too).

What it looks like:

• Omitting or substituting letters at the beginning of words: reading “yellow” as “pillow”
• Errors concentrated at the left edge (or right edge) of words
• May affect reading but not other visual tasks

This is related to the brain’s attentional systems and how visual space is processed — and it can occur in otherwise capable readers.

Deep dyslexia involves damage to both main reading routes simultaneously, forcing the brain to read only through the semantic (meaning) system.

What it looks like:

• Semantic errors: reading “sand” as “beach,” or “dog” as “cat” — the meaning is related but the word is wrong
• Severe difficulty with nonsense words
• Struggles with abstract words, function words (like “the,” “but”), and complex words
• Reading feels more like a guessing game based on context

Deep dyslexia is rarer in children, but documented cases exist. It represents one of the most profound disruptions to the reading network.

A more recently described type, vowel dyslexia specifically affects the reading of vowels while leaving consonant reading intact — the reverse of what most people would expect.

What it looks like:

• Vowel substitutions, omissions, or additions in reading
• Errors are limited to vowels; consonants are read correctly
• Often only visible in nonsense words (since familiar words can be read from memory)

Visual dyslexia is a broader category covering various errors where the word produced shares some letters with the target but can’t be explained by position errors, letter identity confusion, or attentional issues alone.

What it looks like:

• Reading “unicorn” as “united” or “acorn” — letters are shared but the word is wrong
• A mix of substitutions, omissions, and additions
• Single-letter identification is usually intact