ABSTRACT
Imagine that you have been asked to evaluate a patient with a reading disorder, a patient similar to the case described by Caramazza and Hillis ( 1991 ). According to that report, patient HW is capable of reading certain words when they are used as nouns (e.g., There is a crack in the mirror.), but not when they are used as verbs (e.g., Do not crack the nuts in here.) How can it be that this patient's reading performance could be so different for the same word when used in different grammatical contexts? Similarly, what of the type of patient described by Saffran and Marin (1977), who might see the word "crocus" but read it as "tulip"? How are we to understand these kinds of deficits?
