Nonconscious reading? Evidence from neglect dyslexia.

In this study we present evidence which supports the view that reading mechanisms, if implicit assessed, are available also in the presence of a severe deficit of spatial awareness. A Stroop-like task was performed by a right brain-damaged patient affected by severe extrapersonal neglect and neglect dyslexia. In reading words and color words, the patient showed the usual pattern of neglect errors; omission, substitution and addition errors. However, when asked to name the colors in which color words were written, naming time was found to be affected by the meaning of those words he was not able to read correctly. The pattern of results in MD and in a group of normal subjects, who performed a modified version of the Stroop test performed by MD, have been interpreted as evidence of MD's implicit reading of the left-hand letters of color words during the Stroop test. The theoretical implications of this finding are discussed. Moreover, the comparison between the performance of MD and the performance of another group of normal subjects suggested that implicit processing in MD was carried out at a lower level of efficiency than in normals.