Deficit to stimulus-centered, letter shape representations in a case of "unilateral neglect".

A brain-damaged subject is described whose pattern of performance in various reading tasks can be explained by proposing damage at a level of the word recognition process in which a representation with stimulus-centered, rather than retinal- or word-centered, coordinates is processed. Analysis of her reading performance as a function of topographical arrangement of letters, position of errors in the letter string, and the effects of letter spacing and of adding a prefix or suffix provide evidence not only for the existence of this level of representation (the letter-shape map in a model proposed by Caramazza and Hillis [3]), but also for specific assumptions about its functioning and structure.