An Investigation of Attentional Contributions to Visual Errors in Right “Neglect Dyslexia”

One type of error that is sometimes produced by patients with acquired dyslexia is the substitution of an orthographically similar word with letters that overlap the target either in early or late letter positions. When such errors affect the left sides of words, they are usually produced by patients with focal right hemisphere lesions who typically show evidence of left neglect in non-reading tasks. This pattern has thus been termed “neglect dyslexia”. When the right sides of words are affected, however, patients frequently fail to show any signs of neglect in tasks other than reading. This study presents results from a patient with left hemisphere damage, and a very clear pattern of right “neglect” errors in reading, on a series of tasks testing attentional and imagery processes. Given the magnitude and consistency of the patient's reading errors, there was little evidence that these errors resulted from inattention to the right side of space or to the right side of an internally generated visual image. It is argued that the positional errors result from an impairment to an abstract ordinal code with graded activation of letter positions from first to last, and that this code is specific to tasks involving orthographic representations.