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Examinations of reading provide important insights into the neural basis for uniquely human cognitive capacities. Dejerine1 was perhaps the first to recognize the critical distinction between “pure word blindness” that affects reading in isolation and a central disorder of reading that co-occurs with other language impairments such as agraphia and aphasia. He attributed the central reading deficit to a lesion in the left angular gyrus where “word forms” are stored, but pure alexia was related to a disconnection of this language region from the area responsible for visual sensory processing of “letter forms.” A recent theory derived from Dejerine’s view attributes pure alexia to disruption of a reading-specific process in which the automatic and parallel process of grouping letters into higher order word forms is disrupted.2,3⇓ According to this approach, the phenomenon of letter-by-letter reading in pure alexia is caused by the laborious input of a sequence of individual symbols from the letter recognition system to the word form system.
This view has not been able to accommodate observations such as the pure alexic’s ability to recognize rapidly presented words4 or to recognize letters better in the context of words than nonwords.5 An alternate theory, also based on early observations,6 attributes pure alexia to a disorder of visual processing. Reading errors have been related to perceptual confusions …
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