Definition and symptoms of Deep alexia

Alexia is a term describing a partial or complete inability to read. There are a number of different subtypes of alexia, but all have in common the feature that the affected patient cannot read normally, so that reading is slow or impossible, and comprehension is impaired. Stroke is the most common cause of acquired alexia, though other forms of neurological disease can also cause alexia

Individuals with acquired alexia can be classified into four groups: deep alexia, surface alexia, phonological alexia and purealexia.

In deep alexia there is impairment to the lexical–semantic system, so that semantic errors are common in reading. Deep dyslexics often make 'semantic' reading errors, reading one word for another entirely different word.

Patients with deep alexia reliably display a number of alexic symptoms when reading words aloud, in addition to the production of semantic paralexias. These include the production of morphologic paralexias, a part of speech effect (nouns better than verbs and functors), and a concreteness effect (concrete words better than abstract words), in addition to marked difficulty reading pseudowords.

The main features of deep alexia are as follows:
▪Normal reading of familiar and highly imageable words, regardless of whether they have regular (“desk”) or irregular (“yacht”) grapheme-phoneme correspondence.
▪Inability to read pseudowords correctly according to the usual grapheme-phoneme conversion rules of the language.
▪Visual reading errors (e.g., “patience” for “patients”) and semantic reading errors (e.g., “ship” for “boat,” “cash” for “money”) are common.

Definition and symptoms of Deep alexia