[A case of a non-reading child. Application of the aphasiologic methods. Results]

Children over nine who can't manage to learn written language insofar as they have no major handicap (be it intellectual, sensorial, psycho-affective or socio-cultural) and in spite of psychotherapy and educational and orthophonic measures that have been tried successfully, can be placed in the category of non-readers. Applying aphasiological reeducation methods to one child of eleven who was a non-reader with a well-documented therapeutic past allowed him to learn to read and write in six months. This approach is based on an enlarged definition of aphasia and theoretical hypotheses derived from the theories of the linguist Gustave Guillaume. A pragmatic approach emerges, analyzing and placing the observed weakness in an outline of linguistic functions: a set of the circuits connecting mental images (oral and graphic) to words and sensorial data. Each time a weak point or a pathological mechanism can be pinned down and analyzed, it can lead to an adapted strategy of reeducation which, because its success can be checked, allows us to keep the original hypothesis. In this case, setting up a lexical procedure that could be closely checked and within a reasonable time frame, whereas all the other methods had been inefficient, shows how reliable this way is, and therefore its theoretical interest.