LEXICAL AND SEMANTIC PROCESSING IN THE ABSENCE OF WORD READING - EVIDENCE FROM NEGLECT DYSLEXIA

Nine patients with left-sided neglect and nine matched control patient s performed three tasks on horizontal(either normal or mirror-reversed ) letter strings. The tasks were: reading aloud, making a lexical deci sion (word vs non-word), and making a semantic decision (living vs non -living item). Relative to controls, neglect patients performed very p oorly in the reading task, whereas they performed nearly normally in t he lexical and semantic tasks. This was considered to be a dissociatio n between direct tasks, rather than a dissociation between explicit an d implicit knowledge. The explanation offered for the dissociation is in terms of both a dual-route model for reading aloud and a degraded r epresentation of the letter string. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.