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Brain Advance Access originally published online on November 3, 2008
Brain 2008 131(12):3156-3168; doi:10.1093/brain/awn285
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Rehabilitation of hemianopic dyslexia: are words necessary for re-learning oculomotor control?

Susanne Schuett1, Charles A. Heywood1, Robert W. Kentridge1 and Josef Zihl2,3

1Department of Psychology, University of Durham, Durham, UK, 2Department of Psychology, Neuropsychology, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and 3Max-Planck-Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany

Correspondence to: Susanne Schuett, Department of Psychology, University of Durham, Science Laboratories, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK E-mail: susanne.schuett{at}durham.ac.uk

Unilateral homonymous visual field disorders after brain damage are frequently associated with a severe impairment of reading, called hemianopic dyslexia. A specific treatment method has been developed which allows patients to regain sufficient reading performance by re-learning eye-movement control in reading through systematic oculomotor practice. However, it is still unclear whether the treatment effect associated with this training procedure critically depends on using text material. We therefore evaluated the effectiveness of systematic oculomotor training with non-text material (Arabic digits) in comparison with conventional oculomotor training using text material (words) in 40 patients with unilateral homonymous visual field disorders and hemianopic dyslexia. Non-text training was found to be as effective as conventional text training in improving reading performance and associated eye-movements in these patients. Our results suggest that using words is not critical to the treatment effect of this training procedure. Thus, lexical-semantic processes seem not to be necessary for re-learning eye-movement control in hemianopic dyslexia.

Key Words: hemianopia; reading; eye-movements; oculomotor control; perceptual learning

Received June 20, 2008. Revised October 1, 2008. Accepted October 8, 2008.


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