PubMed · 15435641
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G HOLMES. 1950. Pure word blindness.. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15435641/
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In 1892, the French neurologist Jules Déjerine suggested that pure alexia resulted from an occipital lesion that selectively disconnected visual input from a region of the brain that housed "optical images of words." In this issue of Neuron, Gaillard and colleagues offer evidence consistent with Déjerine's proposal and provide new insights to the functional role of the "visual word form area."
The concept of visual dyslexia put forward by Marshall and Newcombe (1973) is assessed. After a long period of neglect it was resurrected in the late 1990s in a narrow form. In the current paper it is proposed that a wider form of the functional syndrome is useful to include amongst other conditions attentional dyslexia and neglect dyslexia. The variety of sub-forms would correspond to the behavioural effects of the different ways in which the orthographic processing systems can be impaired. What distinguishes the broader form from pure alexia is that the patient lacks the capacity to use a serial letter processing strategy, and so interpretation of visual dyslexia in terms of the impairment to the orthographic processing systems is not contaminated by the use of a compensatory strategy that results in processing operations which are qualitatively very different from the normal and highly opaque. The lack of a serial letter processing strategy makes visual dyslexia a much more transparent functional syndrome.