Morphological processing and visual word recognition: Evidence from acquired dyslexia

We report data from language testing of QN, a patient who suffered an impairment of reading and spelling after a left-sided stroke. Most of his errors in reading words aloud were either visual (malady → malay) or morphological (younger → young). Doubts have been raised about the status of errors classiffied as morphological: Perhaps they are really simply visual errors? Although we were only able to conduct limited investigations with this subject, thedata suggest that his apparent morphological paralexias are genuinely morphological, that they arise within the orthographic recognition system and so are genuine paralexias, and that this morphological disturbance affects reading comprehension as well as reading aloud. In contrast, QN's ability to understand and produce morphological aspects of spoken language was intact.