Dissociations between reading responses and semantic priming effects in a dyslexic patient.

We report a patient (Y.Y.) with senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type. The patient read aloud some words composed of two or three kanji characters with errors applying typical pronunciations of each character and defined them in keeping with the mispronunciation if the pronunciation represented another real word. The results of single-word semantic priming in a lexical decision task, however, suggested normal recognition processes for these kanji-words, despite the patient's reading errors. We consider her reading to represent surface dyslexia in Japanese. We discuss these dissociations between reading responses and priming effects in the context of dual-route models of human reading, and conclude that the "visual route" (direct access from orthography to semantics and phonology) was not completely disrupted, but partially preserved and functioning in automatic access.