VISUAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING AND UNILATERAL NEGLECT - EVIDENCE FROM AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE

This paper investigates the effects of neglect on visual language proc essing from a unique perspective; we present a case study of a deaf us er of American Sign Language who suffers from left visual field neglec t. Surprisingly, the signer's ability to process visual linguistic sig ns is not affected by neglect. In contrast, the processing of non-ling uistic objects is severely impaired. This unique dissociation forces c onsideration of interactions between attention, language structure, la nguage recognition, and object representations. This study provides co mpelling evidence for the interaction between linguistic knowledge and cognitive mechanisms underlying visual attention. Implications for th eories of attention and representation are discussed.