How is your B-A-B-Y? Dissociated oral and written production

Abstract

We report a case study of a patient (HR) with a large left temporal lesion who inserted spelled words, particularly nouns, into his fluent but otherwise empty spoken production. Although he generated neologisms in picture-naming and oral reading tasks, they did not appear in his spontaneous speech. Characteristics of his written production included the following: semantic errors; misspellings; frequency and word-length effects; and better performance for concrete nouns than for low-imageability nouns, verbs, function words, adjectives and adverbs. HR's attempts at writing sentences were agrammatic and notably lacking in verbs; he also performed poorly in generating sentences from printed sentence fragments. Although impaired in auditory rhyming tasks, his performance was superior to the detection of rhymes presented visually. HR's writing performance and the striking differences between his spoken and written output are similar to those of a number of patients previously reported. We note parallels between these patterns and the characteristics of cases where the processing and/or production of written words can be assigned to the right hemisphere.

Key Words:

• dissociated oral production and writing
• right hemisphere involvement in writing