Assessing neglect dyslexia: Usefulness of a computerized procedure

Introduction/Background The neglect syndrome is frequently associated with neglect dyslexia (ND). ND is characterized by omissions or misread initial letters of words. In clinical settings, ND is usually assessed with “paper and pencil” tests. However, without controlling exposure time of items and patients’ response time, ND could be unnoticed. Material and method Our computerized procedure consists of four tasks: a single word reading task, a lexical and a semantic decision task and a text reading task. In each task, the time exposure of the items is controlled and we measured both the errors and the participants’ response time. Twenty-eight brain-damaged patients, including 12 neglect patients, and 30 healthy neurological participants carried out this procedure. Results As expected, neglect patients produced more errors and are slower than brain-damaged patients and healthy volunteers and this especially during the single word reading task. This task shows 256 items: pseudo-words mixed with words (frequent or not, long or short) displaying in different ways (horizontal, vertical without anisometry or with a left or a right anisometry) with or without a spatial index. All this materiel permits error patterns to emerge according to the clinical state (neglect patients, brain-damaged patients or neurological healthy volunteers). Conclusion Our study aimed at proposing computerized tasks to help the diagnostic of neglect dyslexia. The neglect dyslexia could be observed with or without a severe neglect syndrome. In the case of a light neglect syndrome, having a computerized assessment is important in the ND diagnostic process especially as specific pattern have been observed based on the analyses of the error and the response time in the single word reading task.