Developmental Neglect Dyslexia in a Hebrew-Reading Child

This paper describes for the first time a detailed study of a child with neglect dyslexia. NT is 10-year-old child, with left word-based neglect dyslexia, without clinical signs of visuo-spatial neglect. Since he is a native speaker of Hebrew, which is read from right to left, his neglect dyslexia manifests in omissions and substitutions of final letters. He is severely impaired in single words, with 96% of his errors being omissions and substitutions of final letters. When presented with more than one word, in word pairs, sentences or text, he neglects the left part of each word, but never omits whole words on the left side of the page. His reading improves considerably when the same word is presented vertically or when manipulations are done to shift his attention to the left – with coloured final letters, flashing light, or tapping his finger to the left of each word. NTʹs neglect dyslexia is very selective, with good reading of numbers and symbols, and even good performance on letter sequences when no reading is required. A dissociation is also detected between his impaired reading due to neglect dyslexia and his normal performance on conventional clinical tests of general visual neglect visual of line, object and letter cancellation, line bisection, object drawing and copying. His neglect dyslexia seems to be developmental as no abrupt onset is reported.