Article

Patients with letter-by-letter alexia may have residual access to lexical or
semantic representations of words despite severely impaired overt word
recognition (reading). Here, we report a multilingual patient with severe
letter-by-letter alexia who rapidly identified the language of written words and
sentences in French and English while he had great difficulty in reading them,
judging their lexical status or extracting semantic information. Lexical decision
was strongly influenced by the orthographic structure of stimuli: whereas he
easily determined the lexical status of illegal nonwords (e.g., 'rsdo'), he had
random performance with legal pseudowords (e.g., 'binus'). When asked to
determine the language of meaningless letter trigrams with high frequency in the
English or French orthography (e.g., 'oth' or 'iqu') his performance was
significantly above chance. In contrast, similarly to healthy participants his
language decision was at chance with low-frequency trigrams. These findings
suggest that written language identification relies on sublexical processing of
orthographic rules specific to each language.
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Langue : ANGLAIS