Routes to reading: a report of a non-semantic reader with equivalent performance on regular and exception words

This study reports the case of a stroke patient, EW, who had severely-impaired comprehension of written words but could read aloud regular and exception words, non-words and sentences flawlessly. EW's auditory comprehension was also impaired. It is argued that these results support a three-route model of reading, where the phonological output lexicon can be activated directly from the orthographic input lexicon, as her reading performance did not conform to the pattern that would be expected from a combination of lexical-semantic and sublexical processing alone. It is suggested that normal reading may be better conceptualised as a summation of three routes, rather than two.