Re-education of a deep dyslexic patient: Rationale of the method and results

A report on the re-education of a deep dyslexic patient with fluent speech is presented. Results of extensive pre-therapeutic testing suggested that the patient was using a direct access route to meaning and that the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules were impaired. To re-educate the reading abilities of our patient, we chose a reorganisational rationale, that is, we tried to reorganise the impaired grapheme-to-phoneme process by using spared lexical knowledge as a relay between graphemes and their pronunciation. Our therapy was divided into three main stages: 1. single grapheme-reading reconstruction by using word codes as an intermediary 2. complex grapheme-reading reconstruction by using a homophonic word code, and 3. learning graphemic contextual rules. After a year of intensive practice to automate the new strategies, the patient was able to read slowly and correctly.