Abstract
This study reports the rehabilitation process of a mild pure alexic patient. The patient, a 28-year-old right-handed Japanese man with a college education, developed right homonymous hemianopsia and pure alexia following an excision of an arteriovenous malformation in the left occipital lobe. After we gave him repetitive practices with flash-cards designed to prompt whole-word reading, the speed of reading 2-or 3-kana character words increased, and the increased speed generalized to untrained words. As regard to 4-or 5-kana character words, however, the speed of reading the trained words increased but the generalization did not occur. Then, we introduced to him the multiple oral rereading (MOR) technique, and the speed of reading paragraphs continued to increase thereafter. These results suggest that the modified flash-cards therapy enabled the patient to acquire speedy reading of 2-or 3-kana character words, but that so-called “word-length effect” might persist despite of the therapy. It is possible that the ability to read rapidly 2-or 3-kana character words might contribute improvement of the overall speed of reading Japanese kanji and kana mixed paragraphs. The implication of these observations for the mechanism of recovery process of pure alexia is discussed.
