Writing two words as one: Word boundary errors in a German case of acquired surface dysgraphia

Abstract

Patients with surface dysgraphia are assumed to have an impairment of a lexical–semantic writing routine. In line with the suggested functional deficit, words with irregular orthography, particularly such of low frequency, are affected. Typically, errors are phonologically plausible (e.g., laugh→laf) suggesting the use of a sublexical phonological writing route. In the present brief report, a patient (MO) with surface dysgraphia was required to write phrases to dictation. Frequently, he reproduced short phrases (“lass das”, ‘leave it’) as one word (<LASDAS>) and tended to delete such segments that are deleted during syllabification in spoken production. For example, MO wrote “kannst du?” (‘can you?’), formally spoken as /kanst du:/ but usually spoken as /kanstu:/, as <KANS TU>. It is suggested that the patient uses ‘phonological words’ (syllabified phonological representations; cf. Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1–75.) as input to his phoneme–grapheme conversion mechanism.