Search

Certain clinical tests of widely reputed importance to reading disability have been applied, together with semi-automated visual sample-matching tasks, to a randomly selected school population of good and poor readers. Those performance deficits found with significant frequency among the poor readers of normal intelligence include laterality awareness of body parts (although not laterality preference), and visual sample-matching with three-letter words where the match involved only the order of letters within the word. Coincidence of these two findings suggests that further study might elucidate some more general deficit of laterality awareness in significant portions of the total population of normally intelligent poor readers.

THE SUBJECT of this report suffered a stroke at the age of 14, and the available evidence suggests extensive damage to the left (dominant) cerebral hemisphere. During the two years since onset of his illness we have carried out a series of behavioral studies relevant to the general problem of interhemispheric relations, with particular reference to language function.Clinical tests indicated that the patient was unable to write single letters to dictation, or even to select a dictated letter from several available visual choices. He was, however, able to deal fairly effectively with simple words on these tasks. It was this apparent discrepancy which prompted us to seek through special testing techniques a more precise delineation of his behavioral deficits.An additional, although not secondary, purpose of this report is to describe an investigative methodology. As is so often the case, our patient's almost complete lack of oral speech