The autonomy of the orthographic pathway in a shallow language: Data from an aphasic patient

Abstract

This paper reports the case of a Spanish monolingual aphasic patient, JD, who showed a severe impairment in language production. Overall, the patient's difficulties were much more severe in oral than in written production. This study was an attempt to test whether writing without phonological mediation is possible in a shallow orthography such as Spanish. The results suggest that even in Spanish, despite its orthographic and phonological transparency, there are two writing routes, one based on the phonological representations of words and the other based on a direct access from semantic to the orthographic representations of words. The role played by each route seems to depend on the strategy used by the writer.