Deep Dysgraphia in Turkish

• Main Authors: Ilhan Raman, Brendan Stuart Weekes
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi Limited 2005-01-01
• Series: Behavioural Neurology
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2005/568540

Deep dysgraphic patients make semantic errors when writing to dictation and they cannot write nonwords. Extant reports of deep dysgraphia come from languages with relatively opaque orthographies. Turkish is a transparent orthography because the bidirectional mappings between phonology and orthography are completely predictable. We report BRB, a biscriptal Turkish-English speaker who has acquired dysgraphia characterised by semantic errors as well as effects of grammatical class and imageability on writing in Turkish. Nonword spelling is abolished. A similar pattern of errors is observed in English. BRB is the first report of acquired dysgraphia in a truly transparent writing system. We argue that deep dysgraphia results from damage to the mappings that are common to both languages between word meanings and orthographic representations.