D. Chialant et A. Caramazza, PERCEPTUAL AND LEXICAL FACTORS IN A CASE OF LETTER-BY-LETTER READING, Cognitive neuropsychology, 15(1-2), 1998, pp. 167-201
We report the case of a letter-by-letter reader (MJ) who showed normal
processing of single letters and who could normally access the orthog
raphic input lexicon when presented with letter names for aural recogn
ition, or when allowed enough time to process a visually presented let
ter string. However, MJ showed severe difficulties in simultaneously p
rocessing multiple letters and other simple visual stimuli. Furthermor
e, she does not have normal access to lexical orthographic representat
ions and their meanings when stimuli are presented for too brief a tim
e to allow for serial processing of the letter string. We found no evi
dence of (partial) lexical or semantic access without corresponding re
cognition of the letters in a word: No signs of implicit reading were
observed when the input stimuli were controlled for the relevant visua
l features; ''implicit reading'' was only obtained under conditions th
at allowed sophisticated guessing. This pattern of results is interpre
ted as indicating that LBL reading (at least in MJ) results from damag
e to prelexical processing mechanisms. In MJ's case, the deficit refle
cts the degraded transfer of information from a normal visual processi
ng system in the right hemisphere to a normal language processing syst
em in the left hemisphere.