Introduction: In normal reading, lexical and sublexical reading processes are activated in parallel, and either the fastest process wins ("horse race models"), or both processes contribute to the recognition of a word ("interactive models"). On the other hand, in acquired alexia's often one reading routine is pathologically preferred, while the other can not be activated at all, so that the reading strategies can be separated. While there is much research done on eye-movements in normal reading, there are only few studies on eye-movements in acquired alexia's (Montant et al., 1998).

Hypothesis: Since eye-movements are conducted by cognitive processes in reading (Just & Carpenter, 1980), we expect that differences in reading strategies cause differences in eye-movements. If this is true, the registration of eye movements would enable us, to detect a switch in reading strategy between item groups according to frequency or word length and different tasks like reading aloud and lexical decision, which would be of theoretical and diagnostic value. If differences in reading strategies cause differences in eye-movements, we expect the following:

Method: The study consists of a reading aloud task and a lexical decision task. Stimuli, balanced for concreteness and number of syllables, are the following:
- 120 words,
- - - 30 high frequent words, short (4-5 letters),
- - - 30 high frequent words, long (8-9 letters),
- - - 30 low frequency words, short (4-5 letters),
- - - 30 low frequency words, long (8-9 letters),
- 30 pseudowords, which do not violate the orthographic regularities of German words,
- - - 15 pseudowords, short (4-5 letters),
- - - 15 pseudowords, long (8-9 letters),
- 15 nonwords, which violate the orthographic regularities of German words.
Eye movements were registered with the pupil-corneal-reflection method (Debic 84). We examined the following subjects:
- 10 healthy students without any reading disorders,
- 3 aphasic patients with pathological lexical reading strategy,
- 3 aphasic patients with pathological sublexical reading strategy.
The data analysis comprises reaction time, number of fixations and number of refixations kept separate for each stimulus group and for right and wrong reactions.

Results: The data analysis is not completed yet but first results show that eye-movements reveal pathological reading strategies.

Literature:
Just, M.A., Carpenter, P.A., 1980. A theory of reading: From eye fixations to comprehension. Psychological Review, 87: 329-354.
Montant, M., Nazir, T.A., Poncet, M., 1998. Pure Alexia and the Viewing Position Effect in Printed Words. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 15(1/2): 93-140.