READING OF LETTERS AND WORDS IN A PATIENT WITH BALINTS-SYNDROME

A patient with bilateral parietal damage, and Balint's syndrome, named visual letters. These were presented individually or within four-lett er strings. Solitary letters were identified very accurately. In the c ase of strings, more letters were correctly reported for words than fo r nonwords, and more for pronounceable than for unpronounceable nonwor ds. When required to read words as a whole, performance was better!han predicted by letter-reports. These results extend the object-based li mitation apparent in Balint's syndrome to the case of reading. The com ponent letters of a string benefit when they form a familiar global ob ject, rather than requiring representation as multiple separate object s, The patient occasionally made homophonic errors when listing the le tters in a visual word. This suggests an attempt to bypass Visual simu ltanagnosia by treating the string as a single object, deriving a holi stic phonological code for it, and then decomposing this into componen t letters via spelling rules.