Acquired dysgraphia in Chinese: Further evidence on the links between phonology and orthography

Abstract

Background: How similar is the "architecture" of language function in different languages? In the domain of reading and writing, the relationship between orthographic and phonological units of the language differs dramatically between alphabetic and logographic writing systems. It is therefore appropriate to ask whether an architecture assumption, such as direct links between word pronunciations and their written forms, developed in the course of research on English and other alphabetic writing systems, applies to logographic Chinese. Aims: We describe a native Cantonese speaker, TUA, with an acquired dysgraphia following a right hemisphere stroke. The study was designed to identify the conditions under which TUA succeeded or failed to produce the correct orthographic form of words in his native language, and thereby to draw inferences about his impaired and intact writing procedures with further implications for normal writing. Methods & Procedures: Nine different single-word tests were administered to TUA, mainly of writing to dictation but also of written picture naming and other relevant skills. Almost all monosyllabic words in Cantonese are homophones and, in the majority of our tests, the target words were lower-frequency homophones, with the intended alternative disambiguated by a semantic cue. Outcomes & Results: TUA made few errors in writing high-frequency words to dictation, but had error rates as high as 60-70% on lower-frequency homophonic target words. The majority of his errors were homophones of, or at least closely phonologically related to, the target item. This deficit in writing to dictation co-existed with adequate ability to define the correct lower-frequency homophonic alternative, and with the unusual pattern of more correct responses in written picture naming than in writing to dictation of the same target items. Although TUA's poor performance in writing was accompanied by several nonlinguistic impairments (e.g., in visual memory, sequencing, and visuo-constructional ability), his dysgraphia had a predominantly linguistic nature and did not invite an account in terms of these additional cognitive impairments. Conclusions: We propose that TUA had a disrupted ability to activate lower-frequency orthographic representations, especially under conditions of response competition from a higher-frequency written word with the same pronunciation. This pattern is compatible with a proposal of direct activation of orthography by phonology, at least for higher-frequency words, in Chinese.