Neurolinguistic analysis of a case of phonological alexia in Arabic language

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.