Letter position dysgraphia

Abstract

The article describes AE, a Hebrew-speaking individual with acquired dysgraphia, who makes mainly letter position errors in writing. His dysgraphia resulted from impairment in the graphemic buffer, but unlike previously studied patients, most of his errors related to the position of letters rather than to letter identity: 80% of his errors were letter position errors in writing, and only 7% of his errors were letter omissions, substitutions, and additions. Letter position errors were the main error type across tasks (writing to dictation and written naming), across output modalities (writing and typing), and across stimuli, e.g., migratable words (words in which letter migration forms another word), irregular words, and nonwords. Letter position errors occurred mainly in the middle letters of a word. AE's writing showed a significant length effect, and no lexicality, migratability, or frequency effects. His letter position deficit was manifested selectively in writing; he made no letter position errors in reading, demonstrating the dissociability of letter position encoding in reading and writing. These data support the existence of a letter order function in the graphemic buffer that is separate from the function responsible for activating letter identities.