Acquired dysgraphia with selective damage to the graphemic buffer: a single case report

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Acquired dysgraphia is a language disorder affecting writing abilities.
• Understanding the underlying neural mechanisms is crucial for diagnosis and treatment.

Observation:

• A single patient presented with acquired dysgraphia, exhibiting significant spelling errors (deletions, substitutions).
• Errors occurred for both real words and non-words across oral spelling, written spelling, and delayed copying tasks.

Findings:

• Spelling accuracy was independent of lexical factors but significantly correlated with word length.
• The patient's consistent errors across modalities support the hypothesis of a specific deficit.

Implications:

• The findings suggest selective damage to the Graphemic Buffer as the cause of the observed dysgraphia.
• This case provides valuable insights into the cognitive architecture of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and spelling.