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Patients with letter-by-letter alexia may have residual access to lexical or semantic representations of words despite severely impaired overt word recognition (reading). Here, we report a multilingual patient with severe letter-by-letter alexia who rapidly identified the language of written words and sentences in French and English while he had great difficulty in reading them, judging their lexical status or extracting semantic information. Lexical decision was strongly influenced by the orthographic structure of stimuli: whereas he easily determined the lexical status of illegal nonwords (e.g., "rsdo"), he had random performance with legal pseudowords (e.g., "binus"). When asked to determine the language of meaningless letter trigrams with high frequency in the English or French orthography (e.g., "oth" or "iqu") his performance was significantly above chance. In contrast, similarly to healthy participants his language decision was at chance with low-frequency trigrams. These findings suggest that written language identification relies on sublexical processing of orthographic rules specific to each language. (Contains 3 figures and 2 tables.)

Neglect dyslexia--a peripheral reading disorder generally associated with left spatial neglect--is characterized by omissions or substitutions of the initial letters of words. Several observations suggest that neglect dyslexia errors are independent of viewer-centered coordinates; the disorder is therefore thought to reflect impairment at the level of object-centered representations. This hypothesis is indirectly supported by lesion studies connecting object-centered neglect errors with damage to posterior cortical regions lying in the ventral visual stream. Here, we performed a lesion-symptom mapping study of 40 patients with spatial neglect asked to read words presented at different positions relative to a viewer-centered coordinate frame. We found that the frequency of object-centered reading errors was constant across horizontal positions, whereas the frequency of entirely neglected words (reflecting a page-centered deficit) linearly increased from right to left. Damage to the intraparietal sulcus and the angular and middle temporal gyri was the best predictor of object-centered errors. We discuss these findings with reference to a role of the posterior parietal lobe in adapting the size of the attentional focus and biasing object representations elaborated in the ventral visual stream. (Contains 4 tables and 5 figures.)

Neuropsychological deficits and brain damage following SARS‐CoV‐2 infection are not well understood. Then, 116 patients, with either severe, moderate, or mild disease in the acute phase underwent neuropsychological and olfactory tests, as well as completed psychiatric and respiratory questionnaires at 223 ± 42 days postinfection. Additionally, a subgroup of 50 patients underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. Patients in the severe group displayed poorer verbal episodic memory performances, and moderate patients had reduced mental flexibility. Neuroimaging revealed patterns of hypofunctional and hyperfunctional connectivities in severe patients, while only hyperconnectivity patterns were observed for moderate. The default mode, somatosensory, dorsal attention, subcortical, and cerebellar networks were implicated. Partial least squares correlations analysis confirmed specific association between memory, executive functions performances and brain functional connectivity. The severity of the infection in the acute phase is a predictor of neuropsychological performance 6–9 months following SARS‐CoV‐2 infection. SARS‐CoV‐2 infection causes long‐term memory and executive dysfunctions, related to large‐scale functional brain connectivity alterations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]