A Case Study of Cantonese Acquired Dysgraphia – Data for the Organization of the Orthographic Lexicon

This paper reports a case study of a Chinese-speaking dysgraphic patient, NMY. Among his written errors in written naming and writing-to-dictation were phonologically plausible errors. Since his semantic processing of content words were hypothesized to be largely intact, as evidenced by normal performance on non-verbal semantic tests and word-picture matching, the occurrence of such errors provides evidence supporting previous proposals about the existence of non-semantic pathway of writing Chinese and the access from phonological output lexicon to orthographic output lexicon. In addition, the percentage of substituted or inserted signific radicals that were semantically related to the target words were shown to be higher than chance level. It provides supporting data for the existence of radical level in Chinese lexical processing and the direct connections between this level and the semantic units.