Abstract: A patient with pure alexia after occipital lobe and splenium infarction was investigated systematically in cognition and speech. It suggested that the damage of the route from orthographic processing to mental lexicon might cause reading disability, that meant the patient can not extract the phonological and semantic information from the mental lexicon. This patient presented some visual perception disorder, but the significance of visual perception still needs further research.

Key words: pure alexia, cognitive neuropsychology, orthography, mental lexicon, visual perception