Article

Patients who read in a letter-by-letter manner can demonstrate effects of lexical
variables when reading words comprised of low confusability letters, suggesting
the capacity to process low-confusability words in parallel across the letters
(Fiset, Arguin, & McCabe, 2006). Here a series of experiments is presented
investigating letter confusability effects in MAH, a patient with expressive and
receptive aphasia who shows reduced reading accuracy with longer words, and DM, a
relatively "pure" alexic patient. Two rehabilitation studies were employed: (i) a
word-level therapy and (ii) a letter-level therapy designed to improve
discrimination of individual letters. The word-level treatment produced
generalised improvement to low-confusability words only, but the serial
processing treatment produced improvement on both high and low confusability
words. The results add support to the hypothesis that letter confusability plays
a key role in letter-by-letter reading, and suggest that a rehabilitation method
aimed at reducing ambiguities in letter identification may be particularly
effective for treating letter-by-letter reading.

Langue : ANGLAIS