Deficit of the graphemic buffer: Effects of a written lexical segmentation strategy

Abstract

In this study, we describe a treatment applied to a patient (AM) who presented, among other language deficits, a severe alteration of the graphemic buffer. Inspired by the rare studies devoted to the re-education of this component, the aim of the therapy was not to restore the general functioning of this short-term memory store but to compensate its dysfunction by teaching the patient to divide long words into meaningful sub-segments. Due to the acoustico-phonological deficits presented by our patient, this strategy was centred on lexical written segmentation. We discuss our results with reference to the interpretation formulated by Aliminosa and co-workers (1993) in a recent paper “Remediation of acquired dysgraphia as a technique for testing interpretations of deficits”.