PART ONE
FE is a native Spanish speaker, born in 1953 in Colombia, South
America, who came to study in the UK at the age of 18. His family
background is middle class, and he has no history of birth trauma,
physical illness, or any form of delayed mental development. He does,
however, have severe difficulty with English spelling, and in 1981, he
approached his doctor about this problem, because it was feared that his
poor spelling might prevent him from passing his final examinations.
Subsequent tests (administered in English) showed that he was of
"superior" intelligence (an IQ of 125 on the Raven tests; Raven 1977). A
small discrepancy was found between his scores on verbal and non-verbal
tests (the latter were higher), and he also showed a slight short term
memory deficit in that his ability to remember strings of digits is rather
less than it ought to be. Both these deficits would be expected in an L2
speaker, however.