A LETTER-BY-LETTER READER WHO COULD NOT READ NONWORDS

Letter-by-letter reading is a neuropsychological syndrome characterized by oral reading which seems to be mediated by explicit naming of constituent letters of the printed string. Thus reading time rises abnormally as a function of the length of the items tobe-read. This syndrome is generally interpreted as indicating a disconnection within the normal reading system prior to the activation of the visual and phonological lexical access routes. The patient retains a subsidiary strategy of spelling words by naming their constituent letters and uses this strategy for planning their pronunciation. If this interpretation is correct then reading aloud in letter-by-letter reading should not be affected by the features of the letter string which are stored lexically as the functional disconnection is postulated to occur prior to this stage. In this paper we report the case of a letter-by-letter reader who shows some signs which are puzzling in terms of current interpretations of the syndrome. They can be summarized as follows: (1) The patient reads words better than he reads nonwords; (2) Concrete words are processed more holistically while abstract words are processed more letter-by-letter; (3) Lexical decisions can be made far more rapidly than words can be read aloud. These three signs are very difficult to account for if reading is accomplished solely through a non-lexical reversed spelling strategy. Our experimental investigations of this patient are reported and alternative models assuming strategic control over the reading mechanism are discussed. © 1990, Masson Italia Periodici s.r.l. Milano. All rights reserved.