A case of 58-year-old Japanese-Korean bilingual presenting alexia without agraphia was studied.
Clinical diagnosis of cerebral infarction in the left occipital lobe was confirmed by neuroradiological examinations.
Although his native spoken language was Korean, he was educated in Japanese language at school. He spoke both the Korean and the Japanese very fluently, but was barely able to read and to write the Korean until 48 years old, when he began to study them. He mastered them quickly, and his abilities of reading and writing the Korean were the same level as the Japanese before the present illness.
Although his reading was impaired in both languages, the degree of impairment was more severe and the recovery was more delayed in the Korean than in the Japanese.
The rules of Ribot and Pitres in polyglot aphasia can be applied for the recovery pattern in the present case.
There is no established explanation for those discrepancies between languages in polyglot alexia without agraphia. As long as the mechanism of this syndrome is explained by the visualspeech disconnexion, it is unlikely that complexity of graphemic system takes a part in presenting those discrepancies. It seems likely that several different philological factors may contribute to produce the discrepancies between languages in alexia without agraphia of polyglot, like in aphasia.
