Direct dyslexia. Preserved oral reading of real words in Wernicke's aphasia.

A 70-yr-old man was able to read aloud, without comprehending what he read, following a stroke that caused Wernicke's aphasia with severely impaired comprehension of speech. Tested on admission, and at 3 and 9 months, he could read aloud both orthographically simple and orthographically complex real words, and showed neither semantic errors, preference for nouns, nor difficulty with function words. He could not, however, read aloud orthographically simple nonwords. His disorder thus appears to be the first pure example of 'direct dyslexia', which, in contrast to previously well-documented examples of 'deep' and 'surface' dyslexia, implies the existence in reading of a direct route, independent of phonology or semantics, between visual and oral word representations.