Deep dyslexia in the two languages of an Arabic/French bilingual patient

Abstract

We present a single case study of an Arabic/French bilingual patient, ZT, who, at the age of 32, suffered a cerebral vascular accident that resulted in a massive infarct in the left peri-sylvian region. ZT's reading displays the characteristics of the deep dyslexia syndrome in both languages, that is, production of semantic, visual, and morphological errors, and concreteness effect in reading aloud and impossibility of reading nonwords. In the first part of this paper, using a three-route model of reading, we account for the patient's performance by positing functional lesions, which affect the non-lexical, the semantic lexical and the non-semantic lexical routes of reading. Phonological priming observed in a cross-language visual lexical decision task indicates that implicit assembled phonological recoding is possible. The above lesions and implicit nonword reading characterize the output form of deep dyslexia. However, error distribution reveals dissociations across languages (e.g. the semantic error rate is higher in French whereas translations are more frequent in the Arabic testing) that cannot be accounted for within a three-route model. In the second part, extensions to Plaut and Shallice's connectionist model ( Cognitive Neuropsychology, 10 (5) (1993) 377) are proposed to account for the translinguistic errors observed. ZT's error distribution is compared to that obtained by Plaut and Shallice after lesions had been applied at different locations through the 40–60 network. The overall syndrome of deep dyslexia found in both languages is explained as resulting from lesions along the direct (O→I) and output (S→Ip, Ip→P) pathways of reading. Lesions along the output pathway mostly affecting S→Ip connections in French and Ip→P connections in Arabic account for discrepancies in ZT's error pattern across tasks and languages. This case study demonstrates the superiority of a connectionist approach for predicting the error pattern in deep dyslexia.