Topic and Focus: Effect of the activation of the Left Periphery in Neglect Dyslexia.

• ¹ Università degli Studi di Padova, Department of Linguistics, Italy
• ² IRCCS Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo, Italy
• ³ Università degli Studi di Padova, Department of Neuroscience, Italy

The Complementizer Phrase (CP), or Left Periphery (LP) in a cartographic approach, is the interface between pragmatics and syntax. LP is present only when activated and it occupies the highest layer of the syntactic structure, above IP and VP. Topic and Focus (TopP and FocP) are the two central projections of the LP (Rizzi, 1997). Patients with neglect dyslexia (PWND) make substitution and omission errors in reading the contralesional part of the sentence. It has been demonstrated (Friedmann, 2011) that manipulation of the syntactic structure may affect the reading performance of PWND. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that neglect patients’ bias is modulated by stimulus type (Veronelli et al., 2014). The aim of this study is to investigate whether sentences associated to the activation of the LP may affect the reading performance in PWND. Our prediction is that the condition involving the activation of the LP will have a facilitation effect. Participants and method Five Italian-speaking individuals with acquired left neglect dyslexia as a consequence of right-brain-damage were recruited, three males and two females. Mean age was 66 years (49-76). We created a list of 103 sentences: 31 containing a Topic, 31 containing a Contrastive Focus, 5 containing a wh-movement and 36 SVO sentences, whose structure did not imply the activation of the LP. Both sentences with Topic and Focus and SVO sentences were 5 words long on average. Each sentence contained high frequency words. Stimuli were presented in Arial font size 26 in the middle of a horizontal A4 page, 5 stimuli in each page. Participants were asked to read aloud each sentence as accurately as possible. No time limit was imposed and each participant was tested individually in a quiet room. Results Both omission and substitution errors were considered. Results indicate that more errors were made on SVO sentences, while the performance on sentences in which LP was activated was less impaired (p<.01). Discussion The present findings are consistent with previous research, indicating that syntactic structure plays a crucial role in reading performance in PWND. Participants showed a worse performance on sentences with more frequent and simple structure (SVO sentences) rather than on sentences with marked word order (Foci and Topics). Constituent fronting thus plays a role in shifting attention in PWND. This led us to conclude that internal linguistic factors, including activation of the LP, capture attention in different ways, and, as a consequence, have a crucial impact on the performance in neglect dyslexia.