Perception of visual letter strings in a case of left neglect: manipulation of the word form.

Patients with lesions in the right parietal lobe neglect the left side of nonwords much more than the left side of words. This has been interpreted in terms of a more automatic process in reading words. The case of a patient with left visual neglect after a vascular right parietooccipital lesion is presented. He showed the phenomenon of a word superiority effect over nonword in reading at the beginning in a clinical test with static cards; 6 months later, after some recovery, the same phenomenon could be demonstrated only with tachistoscopic presentation, and it occurred even inside the good right visual hemifield. The word form of visually presented stimuli was manipulated, showing that there was a striking effect particularly when spacing the letters of words in a task that requires naming the stimulus. The patient's performance is interpreted in terms of an attentional deficit occurring at an early level of spatial information processing.