A selective deficit for reading vowels in a letter-by-letter reader

Abstract

BM, a patient with fluent aphasia and severe alexia without agraphia is presented. He manifests a clear word length effect which is the hallmark of letter-by-letter reading. However, this letter-by-letter reader comes with an unusual twist, namely a selective difficulty in reading vowels, both in words and non-words. BM´s reading was not influenced by word class, imageability or word frequency. Only one other similar case is known in the literature.