Surface dysgraphia in a regular orthography: apostrophe use by an Italian writer

The Orthographic Ambiguity of the Arabic Graphic System: Evidence from a Case of Central Agraphia Affecting the Two Routes of Spelling

The Arabic writing system includes ambiguities that create difficulties in spelling. These ambiguities relate mainly to the long vowels, some phoneme-grapheme conversions, lexical particularities, and the connectivity of letters. In this article, the first to specifically explore acquired spelling impairments in an Arabic-speaking individual, we report the case of CHS, who presented with agraphia following a stroke. Initial testing indicated substantial impairment of CHS’s spelling abilities in the form of mixed agraphia. The experimental study was specifically designed to explore the influence of the orthographic ambiguity of the Arabic graphemic system on CHS’s spelling performance. The results revealed that CHS had substantial difficulties with orthographic ambiguity and tended to omit ambiguous graphemes. Some of the errors she produced suggested reliance on the sublexical route of spelling, while others rather reflected the adoption of the lexical-semantic route. These findings from a case involving a non-Western, non-Indo-European language contribute to discussions of theoretical models of spelling. They show that CHS’s pattern of impairment is consistent with the summation hypothesis, according to which the lexical-semantic and the sublexical routes interactively contribute to spelling.

DUAL-tDCS Treatment over the Temporo-Parietal Cortex Enhances Writing Skills: First Evidence from Chronic Post-Stroke Aphasia

The learning of writing skills involves the re-engagement of previously established independent procedures. Indeed, the writing deficit an adult may acquire after left hemispheric brain injury is caused by either an impairment to the lexical route, which processes words as a whole, to the sublexical procedure based on phoneme-to-grapheme conversion rules, or to both procedures. To date, several approaches have been proposed for writing disorders, among which, interventions aimed at restoring the sub-lexical procedure were successful in cases of severe agraphia. In a randomized double-blind crossover design, fourteen chronic Italian post-stroke aphasics underwent dual transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) (20 min, 2 mA) with anodal and cathodal current simultaneously placed over the left and right temporo-parietal cortex, respectively. Two different conditions were considered: (1) real, and (2) sham, while performing a writing task. Each experimental condition was performed for ten workdays over two weeks. After real stimulation, a greater amelioration in writing with respect to the sham was found. Relevantly, these effects generalized to different language tasks not directly treated. This evidence suggests, for the first time, that dual tDCS associated with training is efficacious for severe agraphia. Our results confirm the critical role of the temporo-parietal cortex in writing skills.

A phonetic radical account of the phonology-to-Orthography consistency effect on writing Chinese characters: Evidence from a Chinese Dysgraphic patient

This study investigated the sublexical route in writing Chinese characters. Using a writing-to-dictation task, we compared neurotypical participants' performance on writing a set of 40 characters with homophones sharing different phonetic radicals and another set of 40 characters with homophones sharing the same phonetic radicals. The first set of stimuli was regarded as both syllable-to-character and syllable-to-radical inconsistent, while the second set of stimuli was considered syllable-to-radical consistent but syllable-to-character inconsistent. The results of the error analysis showed that the control participants demonstrated a greater tendency to make errors with preserved phonetic radicals in the second set of stimuli. Furthermore, we conducted the same task with a Chinese brain-injured patient, WCY, who had mild dyslexia and severe dysgraphia associated with mild impairment to the lexical semantic route as shown by the patient's character writing. The results showed that WCY demonstrated similar error patterns as those of the control participants and a shorter writing time in the second set of stimuli. Altogether, the observations were taken as evidence that supported our claim that a syllable-to-phonetic radical route governs the sublexical route in Chinese character writing.

When Ciarli Ciaplin Drives a Pejio' in Itali: Writing Loan Words in a Shallow Language

With increasing frequency the lexicon of every language incorporates words taken from other languages (loan words) that become of common use, but whose orthography does not necessarily conform to the rules of the native language. This is particularly true for languages like Italian, where most words can be correctly written by the application of a sublexical phonology-to-orthography conversion procedure. Here we report the case of a neurologically unimpaired, highly educated Italian person, with a specific deficit in writing loan words. The aim of the study is to clarify the nature of her dysgraphic impairment, if linked to a semantic deficit, or alternatively reflecting an acquisition deficit, present both in the phonological and orthographic output lexicons, or specific only for the orthographic lexicon. A qualitative analysis of her errors and a comparison with the performance of a group of age and education matched subjects showed that her error pattern was not an amplification of the task difficulty effect observed in the control subjects, but rather an expression of an impairment in acquiring specific writing procedures.