The neuropsychological profile of a man with a developmental surface dyslexia is presented here. This case study is of interest because J.C. exhibited a pattern of cognitive disorders rarely documented in previous data. Results showed that JC's difficulties in reading comprehension were closely related to complex memory disorders and were also associated with cognitive slowness. The present observations do not support the visual memory failure hypothesis. The data rather suggest that the core difficulty primarily lies with the nonautomatization of grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, which in turn dramatically contributed to lexicon weaknesses. The hypothesis of a timing mechanism in reading disorders is discussed.