Affiliations: School of Psychology, University of Wales, Bangor,
Wales, UK | Department of Psychology, University of Bologna,
Bologna, Italy | Institute of Physiology, University of Bologna,
Bologna, Italy
Note: [] Corresponding author: Giuseppe di Pellegrino, School of
Psychology, University of Wales, Bangor, Brigantia Building, Penrallt Road,
LL57 2 DG, Bangor, Wales, UK. E-mail: g.dipellegrino@ bangor.ac.uk
Abstract: Neglect dyslexia is a disturbance in the allocation of spatial
attention over a letter string following unilateral brain damage. Patients with
this condition may fail to read letters on the contralesional side of an
orthographic string. In some of these cases, reading is better with words than
with non-words. This word superiority effect has received a variety of
explanations that differ, among other things, with regard to the spatial
distribution of attention across the letter string during reading. The primary
goal of the present study was to explore the interaction between attention and
lexical processes by recording eye movements in a patient (F.C.) with severe
left neglect dyslexia who was required to read isolated word and non-word
stimuli of various length. F.C.'s ocular exploration of orthographic stimuli was highly
sensitive to the lexical status of the letter string. We found that: (1) the
location to which F.C. directed his initial saccade (obtained approximately 230
ms post-stimulus onset) differed between word and non-word stimuli; (2) the
patient spent a greater amount of time fixating the contralesional side of word
than non-word strings. Moreover, we also found that F.C. failed to identify the
left letters of a string despite having fixated them, thus showing a clear
dissociation between eye movement responses and conscious access to
orthographic stimuli. Our data suggest the existence of multiple interactions between
lexical, attentional and eye movement systems that occur from very initial
stages of visual word recognition.
