Re-education of a surface dysgraphia with a visual imagery strategy

Abstract

We report the re-education of a brain-damaged patient, LP, who presented a surface dysgraphia. This dysgraphia resulted from impairments of the lexical procedure of writing arising from a deficit located in the orthographic output lexicon. Our hypothesis was that LP had lost the relevant orthographic representations of some words. A two-stage therapeutic programme was carried out. In the first stage, we tried to optimise the relatively spared phonological procedure in writing by re-teaching some graphemic contextual rules. Because of residual surface dyslexia and verbal memory deficits associated with this surface dysgraphia, and because of the structure of the French language, we retaught, in the second stage, the spelling of some irregular and ambiguous words by means of a visual imagery technique. In post-therapy, we observed a selective effect of this imagery strategy by comparison with a classic methodology of repetitive presentation of ambiguous and irregular spellings. The results of our therapy support cognitive-oriented therapeutic approaches and are discussed with regard to recent debates on the subject in neuropsychology.