Price C J, Humphreys G W
MRC Cyclotron Unit, Hammersmith Hospital, London, U.K.
Q J Exp Psychol A. 1995 Aug;48(3):573-97. doi: 10.1080/14640749508401406.
The reading behaviour of two alexic patients (SA and WH) is reported. Both patients are severely impaired at reading single words, and both show abnormally strong effects of word length when reading. These two symptoms are characteristic of letter-by-letter reading. Experiment 1 examined the pattern of errors when the patients read large and small words. Further experiments examined the effects of inter-letter spacing on word naming (Experiments 2a and 2b) and the identification of letters in letter strings (Experiment 3). For both patients, letter identification was better for widely spaced letters in letter strings, and this effect was most pronounced for the central letters in the strings. This is consistent with abnormally strong flanker interference in letter identification. However, inter-letter spacing affected word reading behaviour in the two patients in different ways. SA's word reading improved with widely spaced letters; WH's word reading was disrupted. This suggests that these patients adopted different strategies when reading words. We conclude that several reading behaviours can elicit word length effects, and that these different behaviours can reflect strategic adaptation to a common functional deficit in patients. We discuss the implications both for understanding alexia and for models of normal word identification.
报告了两名失读症患者（SA和WH）的阅读行为。两名患者在阅读单字时都严重受损，并且在阅读时都表现出异常强烈的单词长度效应。这两种症状是逐字母阅读的特征。实验1研究了患者阅读大、小单词时的错误模式。进一步的实验研究了字母间距对单词命名的影响（实验2a和2b）以及字母串中字母的识别（实验3）。对于两名患者来说，字母串中字母间距较大时字母识别更好，并且这种效应在字母串的中间字母上最为明显。这与字母识别中异常强烈的侧翼干扰一致。然而，字母间距对两名患者的单词阅读行为产生了不同的影响。SA的单词阅读在字母间距较大时得到改善；WH的单词阅读则受到干扰。这表明这些患者在阅读单词时采用了不同的策略。我们得出结论，几种阅读行为都能引发单词长度效应，并且这些不同的行为可以反映患者对共同功能缺陷的策略性适应。我们讨论了这对于理解失读症以及正常单词识别模型的意义。
