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 s ingle words shown to her. SC's reading accuracy was affected by word imagea bility and frequency. Nonword reading was very poor. The majority of SC's e rrors 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 nami ng and also showed evidence of a general semantic impairment. We consider t he 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 the se two patients may reflect a combination of visual and semantic impairment s.