Articulatory processes and phonologic dyslexia.

Background/objective: Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (GPC) allows the pronunciation of nonword letter strings and of real words with which the literate reader has no previous experience. Although cross-modal association between visual (orthographic) and auditory (phonemic-input) representations may contribute to GPC, many cases of deep or phonologic alexia result from injury to anterior perisylvian regions. Thus, GPC may rely upon associations between orthographic and articulatory (phonemic-output) representations.

Method/results/conclusion: Detailed analysis of a patient with phonologic alexia suggests that defective knowledge of the position and motion of the articulatory apparatus might contribute to impaired transcoding from letters to sounds.