Lexical and semantic processing in the absence of word reading: Evidence from neglect dyslexia

• Published in: Neuropsychologia Vol. 35; no. 8; pp. 1075 - 1085
• Main Authors: Làdavas, Elisabetta, Umilta, Carlo, Mapelli, Daniela
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 01.08.1997; Elsevier Science
• Subjects: Adult and adolescent clinical studies; Aged; Aged, 80 and over; Biological and medical sciences; Dyslexia; Dyslexia, Acquired - physiopathology; Female; Humans; Language; Language and communication disorders; lexical/semantic access; Male; Medical sciences; Middle Aged; neglect dyslexia; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychopathology. Psychiatry; Reading; Reading Processes; reading routes; Semantic Processing; visual attention; Visual Perception; visual attention; lexical/semantic access; reading routes; neglect dyslexia; Human; Communication disorder; Nervous system diseases; Cognitive disorder; Reading disorder; Semantics; Lexical decision; Dyslexia; Neurological disorder; Visual attention; Language disorder; Neglect of space exploration
• ISSN: 0028-3932; 1873-3514
• DOI: 10.1016/S0028-3932(97)00032-8

Nine patients with left-sided neglect and nine matched control patients performed three tasks on horizontal (either normal or mirror-reversed) letter strings. The tasks were: reading aloud, making a lexical decision (word vs non-word), and making a semantic decision (living vs non-living item). Relative to controls, neglect patients performed very poorly in the reading task, whereas they performed nearly normally in the lexical and semantic tasks. This was considered to be a dissociation between direct tasks, rather than a dissociation between explicit and implicit knowledge. The explanation offered for the dissociation is in terms of both a dual-route model for reading aloud and a degraded representation of the letter string.