SPATIAL REPRESENTATION OF WORDS IN THE BRAIN IMPLIED BY STUDIES OF A UNILATERAL NEGLECT PATIENT
SPATIAL REPRESENTATION OF WORDS IN THE BRAIN IMPLIED BY STUDIES OF A UNILATERAL NEGLECT PATIENT
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DOI：
10.1038/346267a0
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发表时间：
1990-07-19
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
HILLIS, AE
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
CARAMAZZA, A;HILLIS, AE
阅读和写作需要使用存储的单词拼写知识。据推测，我们认识到chair（椅子）而不是chareorchiaras是一个英语单词，同样地，我们会写“chair”而不是“chare”或“chiar”，因为我们访问了正字法表示，指定了组成单词1、2的字母素（抽象字母表示）的身份和顺序。因此，一个基本问题涉及到假设的正字法表示的内容和结构，以及关于字素顺序的信息是如何表示和处理的。我们提出的证据从脑损伤患者（N.G.）与单侧忽视，这一信息是编码的空间。单侧忽视是一种临床特征为无法感知或响应病变部位对侧的刺激的疾病，尽管没有明显的感觉或运动缺陷3,4。患者只在单词的右半部分出现阅读和拼写错误，而与长度无关。此外，她在阅读和拼写中产生了相同的错误模式，而不考虑阅读刺激的地形排列（水平、垂直或倒过来的单词）和拼写反应的类型（书面、口头或反向口头拼写）。这种表现模式表明，正字法表示中的顺序信息是在以单词为中心的坐标系统中编码的；也就是说，在一个空间定义的坐标系中，其中心对应于一个规范的、方向不变的单词表示的中点，而不是单词刺激的中点5。
READING and writing require access to stored knowledge about the spelling of words. Presumably, we recognizechairbut notchareorchiaras a word of English, and similarly would write 'chair' but not 'chare' or 'chiar', because we access orthographic representations that specify the identity and the order of the graphemes (abstract letter representations) that comprise the spelling of words1,2. Thus, a fundamental problem concerns the content and structure of the hypothesized orthographic representations, and how information about grapheme order is represented and processed. We present evidence from a brain-damaged patient (N.G.) with unilateral neglect that this information is coded spatially. Unilateral neglect is a disorder clinically characterized by the inability to perceive or respond to stimuli presented to the side contralateral to the site of lesion, despite the absence of significant sensory or motor deficits3,4. The patient made reading and spelling errors only on the right half of words, regardless of length. Furthermore, she produced the same pattern of errors in reading and spelling, irrespective of the topographic arrangement of stimuli in reading (horizontal, vertical or mirror-reversed words) and of the type of response in spelling (written, oral or backward oral spelling). This pattern of performance suggests that order information in orthographic representations is coded spatially in a word-centred coordinate system; that is, in a spatially defined coordinate frame whose centre corresponds to the midpoint of a canonical, orientation-invariant representation of the word and not the midpoint of the word stimulus5.