We report on a case of a French-speaking patient whose performance on
reading aloud single words was characteristically deep dyslexic (in spite of
preserved ability to identify letters), and whose comprehension on silent sentence
reading was agrammatic and strikingly poorer than on oral reading.
The first part of the study is mainly informative as regards (i) the relationship
between letter identification, semantic paralexias and the ability to read nonwords,
(ii) the differential character of silent and oral reading tasks, and (iii)
the potential modality-dependent character of the deficits in comprehension
encountered. In the second part of the study we examine the patient's sensitivity
to verb-noun ambiguity and probe her skills in the comprehension of
indexical structures by exploring her ability to cope with number agreement
and temporal and prepositional relations. The results indicate the patient's sensitivity
to certain dimensions of these linguistic categories, reveal a partly correct
basis for certain incorrect responses, and, on the whole, favor a definition
of the patient's disorders in terms of a deficit in integrating indexical information
in language comprehension. More generally, the present study substantiates a
microgenetic approach to neuropsychology, where the pathological behavior
due to brain damage is described as an arrest of microgenesis at an early stage
of development, so that patient's responses take the form of unfinished "products"
which would normally undergo further development.