Phonological Alexia in Japanese: A Case Study

A pattern of highly selective impairment in reading nonwords is described in a Japanese patient, TY, who achieved essentially normal performance on most of a range of other language abilities tested. Other prominent features of TY's reading were: (1) almost flawless reading of all types of familiar words in both kanji and kana; (2) differential performance, both quantitative and qualitative, on three types of nonwords constructed by altering real words in various ways; (3) dramatic improvement in pronunciation of orthographic nonwords with phonologically familiar pronunciations (pseudohomophones); and (4) from near-normal to impaired performance on different types of mora-based phonological manipulation tasks. With reference to the so-called “triangle” framework of reading (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996; Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989), these characteristics are interpreted to arise from an impaired phonological production system in which activation tends to fall into familiar patterns c...