A lexical stress effect in neglect dyslexia

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of word stress location in neglect dyslexia. An assessment was made of stress assignment in reading Italian words in 13 patients with neglect dyslexia and 13 matched normal individuals. The correspondence in stress location between target and neglect errors was preserved in 9 patients. Moreover, the proportion of words with stress on the penultimate syllable was about 50% and that on the antepenultimate syllable was also about 50%. This pattern is significantly different from the distribution observed in the Italian lexicon, in which the majority of polysyllabic words are stressed on the penultimate syllable. This result cannot be expected from the application of a "regularization" strategy associated with the operation of a nonlexical reading pathway. Taken together, these findings lead to the conclusion that lexical stress is part of the lexical information preserved in neglect dyslexia.