Converging evidence for the role of occipital regions in orthographic processing: a case of developmental surface dyslexia

Recently, there have been several reports focusing on the neural basis for a ord recognition. Two different views have emerged: one emphasizing the ro le of the left angular gyrus in recognizing printed words, and the second v iew suggesting that visual word processing activates the left extrastriate cortex. This paper describes the case of EBON, a 14-year-old girl with an e xtensive early (most likely congenital) brain lesion in the left occipital lobe. She demonstrates a clear pattern of developmental surface dyslexia in that she is more successful at reading and spelling regular words than irr egular words and makes frequent regularisation errors. Thus. EBON is the fi rst case reported with the potential to establish converging evidence for t he role of extrastriate regions in the left hemisphere in the acquisition o f orthographic representations. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights r eserved.