Further Evidence of a Dissociation between Output Phonological and Orthographic Lexicons: A Case Study

Abstract

We describe a patient who is significantly better at written picture naming than at spoken picture naming. His difficulty in oral production is argued to result from damage to lexical-phonological output processing, suggesting that activation of lexical-phonological output is not necessary to support writing. Nor can his writing be supported by phoneme-to-grapheme conversion rules, as evidenced by a complete inability to write nonwords to dictation. In addition, his reading comprehension appears to be independent of phonological mediation, due to severely impaired phoneme-to-grapheme conversion abilities and impaired understanding of aurally presented words when these words are presented without supporting context. It is argued that writing and reading comprehension do not require the generation of a phonological representation.