Orthographic ambiguity: comments on Baxter and Warrington

In this note, I comment on a recent study by Baxter and Warrington of an acquired dysgraphic patient, KT, that appeared in Cortex, 23, 1987. The focus of my discussion centers around Baxter and Warrington's findings that: (1) KT shows a striking orthographic "regularity" effect in his spelling performance and; (2) KT's use of sound-to-spelling mapping options does not reflect the distribution of use of these options in the word corpus examined. If well-founded, the implications of these results call into question specific features of the dominant model of spelling. However, a close scrutiny of the procedures used by Baxter and Warrington in analyzing their data indicates that they collapsed across factors that have elsewhere been shown to influence spelling performance (i.e., within-syllable frequency of occurrence of phoneme-grapheme mapping options). Therefore, results obtained for patient KT cannot, in their current form, be used to speak to the specific issues of spelling that Baxter and Warrington originally set out to address.