Deep dyslexia in a Dutch-speaking patient

A left-handed, Dutch-speaking woman of average intelligence became aphasie after having sustained a left frontotemporal cerebrovascular accident. As she had made semantic paralexias while reading isolated words during a routine aphasiological assessment, we wanted to know whether she could be characterized as 'deep dyslexic', and whether the deep dyslexia symptom complex described in English-speaking patients would recur in a Dutch-speaking patient. We subsequently administered two experimental reading tests in order to investigate the organization of five situational lexical-semantic categories, and to analyse the types of reading errors affecting different word classes. Our findings, which indicate that the patient is a deep dyslexic reader, shed light upon three theoretical issues: (1) the occurrence of individual differences within the symptom complex, (2) the plurimodality of certain features first thought to be specific to reading, and (3) the underlying causes of the semantic paralexias.