Semantic anomia without surface dyslexia

Abstract

A computational model of oral reading developed by Plaut et al. proposes that reading aloud low-frequency exception words (e.g. yacht) relies upon a reading pathway that maps semantic representations directly onto output phonology. One prediction of this model is that, if the semantic reading pathway is damaged following brain damage, a pattern of surface dyslexic reading will be observed, characterized by frequent regularization errors when reading aloud low-frequency exception words (e.g. shoe → 'show'). We report the oral reading of a semantic anomic patient (B.P.) who makes frequent semantic intrusion errors on confrontation naming tasks as well as semantic errors on word-picture and pic..