Lexical but nonsemantic spelling?

Abstract

The paper presents a case report of an aphasic patient who, at 3–4 months after his cerebro-vascular accident, displayed one rather remarkable language skill. Although GE could not speak, repeat, read aloud, name objects, write the names of objects or write spontaneously, he could write words to dictation with an impressively high degree of success. It seems that for GE, unlike patients previously described in the literature with writing substantially more preserved than speech, proceeding from recognition of a spoken word to its orthography was not primarily based upon a semantic representation. It is suggested that GE may provide some of the first convincing evidence for a ‘third’ routine in spelling.