ABSTRACT

Cases of phonological alexia have been widely studied in various occidental languages, but to our knowledge no case has been reported in Arabic language. We report a neurolinguistic analysis of a single case of phonological alexia in Arabic. AL, 48-year-old, right-handed man, who is a teacher of Arabic, at the age of 35 presented with hemiplegia and severe aphasia. A Cerebral Computed Tomography scan showed a wide left hemispheric infarct. As a result, he developed Broca’s aphasia and alexia. A neurolinguistic analysis of reading was evaluated using the Arabic Dyslexia-Dysgraphia Battery which consists of a corpus of 331 words with different parts of speech and reading task of non-words. The patient had much more difficulty reading non-words than words (90% of errors versus 37%). This is the classical dissociation that characterizes phonological alexia.