Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Unilateral visual neglect is considered primarily an attentional deficit in which a patient fails to report or orient to novel or meaningful stimuli presented contralateral to a hemispheric lesion (Heilman et al. 198S). A recent resurgence of interest in attentional disorders has led to more thorough investigations of patients exhibiting neglect and associated disorders. These studies have begun to illuminate specific components which underlie attentional deficits, and further serve to explicate interactions between attentional mechanisms and other cognitive processes such as lexical and semantic knowledge. The present paper adds to this growing literature and presents a case study of a deaf user of Am^ican Sign Language who evidences severe unilateral left neglect following a right cerebral infarct Surprisingly, his ability to identify visually presented linguistic signs is unaffected by the left neglect, even when the signs fall in his contralesional visual field. In contrast the identification of non-linguistic objects presented to the contralesional visual field is greatly impaired. This novel and important finding has implications for our undo-standing of the domain specificity of attentional disorders and adds new insights into the interactions and penetrability of neglect in the face of linguistic knowledge. These results are discussed in relation to the computation model of neglect proposed by Mozer and Behrmann (1990).