Do reading and spelling share orthographic representations? Evidence from developmental dysgraphia

Treatment of irregular word spelling in developmental surface dysgraphia.

An increasing number of cognitive neuropsychological treatment studies of acquired dysgraphia have been published in recent years, but to our knowledge there are no corresponding studies of developmental dysgraphia. This paper reports a cognitive neuropsychological treatment programme designed for a child with developmental surface dysgraphia. The treatment aim was to improve functioning of the...

Spelling and Reading Representations in Children

Preserved orthographic length and transitional probabilities in written spelling in a case of acquired dysgraphia.

We present the performance of a patient with acquired dysgraphia, DS, who has intact oral spelling (100% correct) but severely impaired written spelling (7% correct). Her errors consisted entirely of well-formed letter substitutions. This striking dissociation is further characterized by consistent preservation of orthographic, as opposed to phonological, length in her written output. This patt...

The role of the Graphemic Buffer in spelling: evidence from a case of acquired dysgraphia.

A dysgraphic patient is described whose deficit is hypothesized to arise from selective damage to the Graphemic Buffer. The patient’s roughly comparable difficulties in oral and written spelling and comparable spelling difficulties in written naming, delayed copy and spelling-to-dictation rule out the hypothesis of selective damage to either input or output mechanisms. More importantly, the nat...

Developmental Relations between Reading Ability and Knowledge of Orthographic Structure

First, second, and third grade readers were asked to pick the item that “looked more like a word” from a pair of letter strings. The items to be discriminated differed in terms of a rule-governed description of orthographic structure. Task performance improved with school experience, averaging 58, 69, and 79% correct for first, second, and third grade readers, respectively. More importantly, re...