Writing two words as one: Word boundary errors in a German case of acquired surface dysgraphia

Patients with surface dysgraphia are assumed to have an impairment of a lexical–semantic writing routine. In line with the suggested functional deficit, words with irregular orthography, particularly such of low frequency, are affected. Typically, errors are phonologically plausible (e.g., laugh→laf) suggesting the use of a sublexical phonological writing route.In the present brief report, a patient (MO) with surface dysgraphia was required to write phrases to dictation. Frequently, he reproduced short phrases (“lass das”, ‘leave it’) as one word () and tended to delete such segments that are deleted during syllabification in spoken production. For example, MO wrote “kannst du?” (‘can you?’), formally spoken as /kanst du:/ but usually spoken as /kanstu:/, as . It is suggested that the patient uses ‘phonological words’ (syllabified phonological representations; cf. Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1–75.) as input to his phoneme–grapheme conversion mechanism.