2019 Volume 39 Issue 4 Pages 404-411
Patients with left neglect dyslexia (ND) may omit letters and words at the beginning of the line on the neglected side. Previous studies have shown that patients with preserved syntactic and semantic knowledge may reduce omissions when urged to allocate attention to the neglected side to ensure that the syntactic and semantic requirements of the sentence are met. This study aimed to test if the position of line break of the sentences determines whether the leftmost letters or words of the following line are missed. The subjects of the study were ten right-handed patients (six males and four females) with left unilateral spatial neglect (USN) caused by right hemisphere stroke and ten right-handed healthy adults (four males and six females) as controls. To assess the effect of positions of line break on left ND, we created five texts comprising 60 lines that break at the word boundaries (word boundary task) and five texts comprising 60 lines that break at the non-word boundaries (non-word boundary task) . Seven among the ten patients omitted letters or words at the beginning of the line, demonstrating left ND. Three among the seven patients omitted significantly more letters or words in the word boundary task than in the non-word boundary task. Our result showed that Japanese lexical knowledge may affect the reading of some patients with left ND.
