An analysis of writing in a case of deep dyslexia

In tests of her ability to produce written and spoken language, this deep dyslexic patient produced semantic, visual, and derivational errors, including functor substitutions, and exhibited part-of-speech and abstractness effects in oral reading, oral and written naming, and writing to dictation, but not in repetition of single words and copying from memory. This patient therefore provides confirmation of the hypothesis presented in Nolan and Caramazza (1982) that the defining symptoms of deep dyslexia will be observed in responses to any task which requires lexical mediation. The patient's written responses in all tasks but direct copying were characterized by spelling errors which included transpositions, omissions, substitutions, and additions of letters. A model of writing is proposed which explains these errors in terms of a disruption of a phoneme-grapheme conversion process which normally functions to prevent decay of information from a Graphemic Buffer.