We present a case study of a 43-year-old woman
with chronic and stable pure alexia. Using a multiple baseline
design we report the results of two different interventions
to improve reading. First, a restitutive treatment
approach using an implicit semantic access strategy was
attempted. This approach was designed to exploit privileged
access to lexical–semantic representations and met
with little success. Treatment was then switched to a substitutive
treatment strategy, which involved using the patient's
finger to pretend to copy the letters in words and sentences.
Reading using this motor cross-cuing strategy
was 100% accurate and doubled in speed after 4 weeks of
intervention. We propose that this patient's inability
to benefit from the implicit semantic access treatment
approach may be in part related to her inability to suppress
the segmental letter identification process of word recognition.
(JINS, 1998, 4, 636–647.)
Brain mechanisms of recovery from pure alexia: A single case study with multiple longitudinal scans
