A 38-year-old, right-handed Arabic-speaking male developed pure word deafness three days after myocardial infarction. He could recognize Arabic music and instruments but not words of songs; a radio broadcast from the Koran, but not the individual words; a male as opposed to female voice; Arabic and non-Arabic languages; and whether sentences were questions, exclamations, or imperatives. He discerned whether the speaker was emotionally neutral, happy, angry or sad. Contextual cues and reducing the rate of speaking aided verbal comprehension. Pure tone threshhold audiometry revealed mild bilateral sensorineural loss up to 2000 Hz and a moderate high frequency loss. Brainstem auditory evoked potentials were normal, cortical auditory evoked potentials abnormal. CT scan revealed bilateral infarcts subcortically just posterior to the left superior temporal gyrus and the right posterior superior and midtemporal regions. Neurolinguistic tests indicated that the deficit is prephonemic and not due to impairment of linguistic discrimination.