Visual paralexias in a Spanish-speaking patient with acquired dyslexia: a consequence of visual and semantic impairments?

We report the case of a Spanish patient SC who misread 55 per cent of the single words shown to her. SC's reading accuracy was affected by word imageability and frequency. Nonword reading was very poor. The majority of SC's errors to real-word targets bore a close visual similarity to the items that elicited them, but there was no indication of an effect of serial position on the probability that a letter from a target word would be incorporated into the error made to that word. SC made some visual errors in object naming and also showed evidence of a general semantic impairment. We consider the similarity between SC and patient AB reported by Lambon Ralph and Ellis (1997), and suggest that the very high levels of visual errors shown by these two patients may reflect a combination of visual and semantic impairments.