Objectives Damage to the left occipito-temporal cortex often leads to pure alexia, which is characterized by an extreme slowness in reading.It is well known that the left hemisphere (LH) is specialized for analytic processing and the RH for holistic processing.We thus hypothesize that the processing of visual words in patients with pure alexia might rely more on holistic process than in normal subjects.Methods We tested a patient with pure alexia and a group of young controls (n =32) using a character composite paradigm, which allows the measurement of failures of selective attention to parts of a character that result from a holistic processing strategy.In this paradigm, participants saw pairs of Chinese characters presented briefly and then made a same/different judgment about the attended halves of the two characters.Results Holistic processing was revealed by the interference from the unattended parts.The patient showed a larger interference effect than the controls.Conclusion Enhanced holistic processing of characters may be a characteristic hallmark of Chinese pure alexia.