Letter-by-letter acquired dyslexia (pure alexia) is assumed to be related to the serial encoding of letters, but the evidence for this assumption is somewhat indirect. Here, we demonstrate that the deficit is indeed due to serial encoding by comparing the performance of a letter-by-letter dyslexic reader with the performance of normal readers who were forced to read letter by letter; the data patterns are remarkably similar.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
ArguinM.BubD.BowersJ. (1998). Extent and limits of covert lexical activation in letter-by-letter reading. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 15, 53–92.
2.
ArguinM.FisetS.BubD. (2002). Sequential and parallel letter processing in letter-by-letter dyslexia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 19, 535–555.
3.
BehrmannM.PlautD.C.NelsonJ. (1998). A literature review and new data supporting an interactive account of letter-by-letter reading. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 15, 7–51.
4.
BehrmannM.ShomsteinS.S.BlackS.E.BartonJ.J.S. (2001). The eye movements of pure alexic patients during reading and nonreading tasks. Neuropsychologia, 39, 983–1002.
5.
CoslettH.B.SaffranE.M. (1989). Evidence for preserved reading in pure alexia. Brain, 112, 327–359.
6.
HowardD. (1991). Letter-by-letter readers: Evidence for parallel processing. In BesnerD.HumphreysG.W. (Eds.), Basic processes in reading: Visual word recognition (pp. 34–76). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
7.
McConkieG.W.RaynerK. (1975). The span of the effective stimulus during an eye fixation in reading. Perception & Psychophysics, 17, 578–586.
8.
OsswaldK.HumphreysG.W.OlsonA. (2002). Words are more than the sum of their parts: Evidence for detrimental effects of word-level information in alexia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 19, 675–695.
9.
PattersonK.E.KayJ. (1992). Letter-by-letter reading: Psychological descriptions of a neurological syndrome. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 34A, 411–441.
RaynerK. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 372–422.
12.
RaynerK.BerteraJ.H. (1979). Reading without a fovea. Science, 206, 468–469.
13.
RaynerK.InhoffA.W.MorrisonR.E.SlowiaczekM.L.BerteraJ.H. (1981). Masking of foveal and parafoveal vision during eye fixations in reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 7, 167–179.
14.
ShalliceT.SaffranE. (1986). Lexical processing in the absence of explicit word identification: Evidence from a letter-by-letter reader. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 3, 429–458.
15.
WarringtonE.K.ShalliceT. (1980). Word form dyslexia. Brain, 103, 99–112.
