We report the pattern of performance on language tasks by a neurologically impaired patient, RCM, who makes semantic errors in writing to dictation and in written naming, but makes very few errors at all (and no semantic errors) in spoken naming, oral reading, or spontaneous speech. RCM also shows a significant effect of concreteness on spelling accuracy and other features of so-called "deep dy...

Students with transcription disabilities (dysgraphia/impaired handwriting, n = 13 or dyslexia/impaired word spelling, n = 16) or without transcription disabilities (controls) completed transcription and translation (idea generating, planning, and creating) writing tasks during fMRI connectivity scanning and compositions after scanning, which were coded for transcription and translation variable...

We report patterns of dysgraphia in participants with primary progressive aphasia that can be explained by assuming disruption of one or more cognitive processes or representations in the complex process of spelling. These patterns are compared to those described in participants with focal lesions (stroke). Using structural imaging techniques, we found that damage to the left extrasylvian regio...

We present a new connectionist model of human spelling and investigate some of its properties. Although based on Sejnowski & Rosenberg’s (1987) NETtalk model of reading, it requires no pre-processing of the training data to align the phonemes and letters. The model achieves 100% performance on the training data (2837 monosyllabic words including many irregular words) and has a generalization pe...

The Gerstmann syndrome of dyscalculia, dysgraphia, left-right confusion, and finger agnosia is generally attributed to lesions near the angular gyrus of the dominant hemisphere. A 68-year-old right-handed woman presented with sudden difficulty completing a Sudoku grid and was found to have dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and left-right confusion. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed a focus of abno...

A male presenting with benign partial epilepsy with rolandic spikes from the age of 7 years was evaluated at age 11 years for worsening of his epilepsy associated with a specific regression of graphomotor skills. A longitudinal study over nearly 2 years showed an improvement in handwriting to an almost normal level under modified antiepileptic therapy. A detailed analysis with a computer-monito...

Models based on the competitive queuing (CQ) approach can explain many of the effects on dysgraphic patients' spelling attributed to disruption of the "graphemic output buffer". Situating such a model in the wider spelling system, however, raises the question of what happens when input to the buffer (e.g., from a semantic system) is degraded while the buffer remains intact. We present a prelimi...