Dissociation between Sound Spelling and Sight Spelling in the Writing of Bilingual Wernickes Aphasia – A Case Report

Abstract

The present study reveals the writing errors in a bilingual Wernickes aphasic with Malayalam as mother tongue and English as second language. The phoneme grapheme conversion route was nonfunctional in both L1 and L2 as indicated by poor scores for writing to dictation as well as on the subtest of sight spelling (the examiner will dictate the word first and then shows the word in which few letters will be missing. Subject has to write the word by filling the missing letters) for nonwords. The good scores obtained on sight spelling for irregular as well as regular words shows that the patient had access to stored whole word orthographic representation in the lexicon, L1 showing better scores than L2 .It is suggested that the intact route, i.e., lexical route may be used for training these patients for retrieving words.