WRITTEN LANGUAGE DISORDERS NEUROPSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITION VOLUME 2 Series Editor: R. Malatesha Joshi, Oklahoma State University, U.S.A. Advisory Board: Alfonso Caramazza, The Johns Hopkins University, U.S.A. George Hynd, University o/Georgia, U.S.A. C.K. Leong, The University o/Victoria, Canada John Marshall, University 0/ Oxford, U.K. Gabriele Miceli, Universita Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore, Italy Loraine Obler, City University 0/ New York, U.S.A. Sandra Witelson, McMaster University, Canada The pUIpose of the Neuropsychology and Cognition series is to bring out volumes that promote understanding in topics relating brain and behavior. It is intended for use by both clinicians and research scientists in the fields of neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, speech and hearing, as well as education. Examples of topics to be covered in the series would relate to memory, language acquisition and breakdown, reading, attention, developing and aging brain. By addressing the theoretical, empirical, and applied aspects of brain-behavior relationships, this series will try to present the information in the fields of neuro psychology and cognition in a coherent manner. The titles published in this series are listed at the end o/this volume. WRITTEN LANGUAGE DISORDERS Edited by R. MALA TESHA JOSHI Oklahoma State University .. SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wrltten language dlsorders I edited by R. Malatesha Joshl. p. cm. -- (Neuropsychology and cognltlon ; 21 Includes bibllographlcal references and Index. ISBN 978-94-010-5659-5 ISBN 978-94-011-3732-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-3732-4 1. Agraphla. 2. AleXla. 1. JOShl, R. Malatesha. II. Serles. RC429.W75 1991 616.85·53--dc20 90-44392 ISBN 978-94-010-5659-5 Printed an acid-free paper AII Rights Reserved © 1991 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1991 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permis sion from the copyright owner. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE Vll LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS IX R. MALATESHA JOSHI and P. G. AARON / Developmental reading and spelling disabilities: Are these dissociable? 1 BEVERLY D. K. MAUL and LINNEA EHRI / Memory for spellings in normal and dysgraphic spellers: Do dysgraphics spell by ear but not eye? 25 HYLA RUBIN / Morphological knowledge and writing ability 43 ALFONSO CARAMAZZA and ARGYE E. HILLIS / Modularity: A perspective from the analysis of acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia 71 GARBRIELE MICELI / On the interpretation of across-patient variability: The mechanisms underlying nonlexical spelling errors 85 YVAN LEBRUN and LUC DE VREESE / Pure alexia 105 YVAN LEBRUN, F. DEVREAUX and CHANTAL LELEUX / Writer's cramp 127 J. RISPENS and 1. A. V AN BRECKELAER / Hyperlexia: Defini- tion and criterion 143 PHILIP A. LUELSDORFF and E. ANN EYLAND / A psycho lingustic model of the bilingual speller 165 INDEX OF NAMES 191 SUBJECT INDEX 195 v PREFACE Although anecdotal reports of loss of once-acquired reading ability was noticed in the individuals who had sustained brain damage as early as the year AD. 30, systematic enquires of alexia were not undertaken until the latter part of the nineteenth century. The two anatomo-pathological studies carried out by Dejerine in 1891 and 1892 mark the beginning of scholarly investigation of reading failure. Interestingly, the study of de velopmental reading disability also began to receive attention at about the same time when Pringle Morgan described the case of a 14-year-old boy who had great difficulty in reading and writing. Since then sporadic reports of developmental reading-writing failure began to appear in medi cal and educational journals even though such investigation went on at an unhurried pace. In the past two decades, however, the situation has changed enormously and hundreds of articles that have investigated developmental and acquired cognitive disabilities have been published. Disorders of spoken language and written language are two areas that have been extensively addressed by these articles. Those who study disorders of language come from a wide variety of backgrounds and their reports are also published in a variety of journals. The purpose of the present volume is to bring some important research findings of written language disorders together and present them in a coherent format. In Chapter 1, Joshi and Aaron challenge the validity of the notion of the putative "poor speller but good reader'. They contend that even though superficially some poor spellers may appear to be good readers, thorough investigation of these subjects would reveal subtle reading dis abilities. They support this conclusion with evidence collected from three college students. In Chapter 2, Maul and Ehri describe experiments that tested the hypothesis that normal spellers use the same processes to read and spell whereas poor spellers use different processes to read and spell. Based on the results of their investigation, they conclude that both good and poor spellers use phonological as well as visual-orthographic processes to spell and read. One of the often quoted reasons for the high incidence of reading and spelling problems in the English language is that there is no consistent relationship between the written and spoken forms of English words. However, investigations that have addressed this issue from a morpho phonemic perspective have concluded that, to a large extent, English language is a rule-governed system of communication. The influence of Vll viii PREFACE morphophonological knowledge on the writing performance of very young children is examined by Rubin. The results of this study are presented in Chapter 3. Whether or not brain damage has differential effect on linguistic and perceptual process is examined in Chapter 4 by Caramazza and Hillis. Their investigations of neuropsychological patients reveal that cognitive skills such as reading and spelling are dissociable. In Chapter 5, Miceli presents a model of the spelling processes based on the evidence collected from patients whose cognitive skills are impaired. This model can accom modate the individual differences that are seen in the performance of these subjects. In the next chapter, Lebrun and De Vreese examine the different forms of alexias. They conclude that there is a great deal of variability among different individuals as far as the nature of symptoms and the rate of recovery are concerned. These authors conclude that because of such variability, a unitary theory of alexia may not be possible. In Chapter 7, Lebrun, Devreaux, and Leleux describe the seldom investigated graphomotor disability called "Writer's cramp". The authors point out that there is no uniformity of symptoms in writer's cramp and conclude the chapter with recommendations for diagnosis and therapy. In contrast to dyslexia, the reading disability known as hyperlexia has a rather brief history. The syndrome of hyperlexia includes superior word decoding skill and an associated poor comprehension. Rispens and van Berckelaer describe the syndrome in Chapter 8 and present criteria for the diagnosis of hyperlexia. In Chapter 9, Luelsdorff and Eyland propose a psycholinguistic model derived from observations made on the spelling performance of bilinguals. Because bilingual subjects who become alexic are rare, the study of bilinguals provides a new perspective for the investigation of the neuro psychology of language processing. In spite of the fact that the articles presented in this book address varying aspects of the written language, they present a single theme, namely the understanding of the neuropsychology of written language pro cessing. Authors of the chapters contained in this volume are well known for their research in this area and I thank them for their contributions. R. MALA TESHA JOSHI LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS P. G. AARON, Department of Educational Psychology, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana, 47809, U.S.A. ALFONSO CARAMAZZA, Cognitive Science Center, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 21218, U.S.A. FRANCOISE DEVREUX, Neurolinguistics Department, School of Medi cine, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1090 Brussels, Belgium. LUC DE VREESE, Neurolinguistics Department, School of Medicine, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1090 Brussels, Belgium. LINNEA C. EHRI, Division of Education, College of Letters and Sciences, University of California, Davis, California, 95616, U.S.A. E. ANN EYLAND, Macquaire University, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Aus tralia. ARGYE E. HILLIS, Cognitive Science Center, The Johns Hopkins Uni versity, Baltimore, Maryland, 21218, U.S.A. R. MALA TESHA JOSHI, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma 74078, U.S.A. YVAN LEBRUN, Neurolinguistics Department, School of Medicine, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1090 Brussels, Belgium. CHANTAL LELEUX, Neurolinguistics Department, School of Medicine, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1090 Brussels, Belgium. PHILIP A. LUELSDORFF, Universitat Regensburg, 8400 Regensburg, Federal Republic of Germany. BEVERLY D. K. MAUL, West Davis Intermediate School, 1207 Sycamore Lane, Davis, CA 95616_llS.A. GABRIELE MICELI, Clinica Neurologica, Universita Cattolica, Largo A. Gemelli 8, 00168, Rome, Italy. JAN RISPENS, Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen, Vakgroep Kinder studies, Postbus 80.140, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands HYLA RUBIN, Graduate Department of Speech Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada M5G lL4. I. A. V AN BERCKELAER, Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen, Uni versity of Leiden, 2334 BP Leiden, The Netherlands. IX R. MALATESHA JOSHI AND P. G. AARON DEVELOPMENTAL READING AND SPELLING DISABILITIES: ARE THESE DISSOCIABLE? 1. INTRODUCTION Studies of developmental dyslexia in children suggest that poor spelling is an inevitable concomitant of poor reading (Cook, 1981; Gerber, 1984; Nelson and Warrington, 1976). This should come as no surprise since it appears that spelling-sound relational rules are used in both reading and spelling (Baron et at., 1980) and that many dyslexic subjects are deficient in these grapheme-phoneme conversion skills (Aaron, 1989; Aaron et al., 1984; Perfetti and Hogaboam, 1975; Snowling, 1980). A recent study by Waters et al. (1985), which specifically examined the question whether children use similar processes to read and spell words, found that third grade children, regardless of their ability level, used spelling-sound corre spondences in both reading and spelling. Conversely, studies of spelling ability also have shown that poor spellers are deficient in decoding skills (Spache, 1940) and that acquisition of spelling involves progressive inter nalization of orthographic rules (Beers, 1980). These observations are further buttressed by the classical neurology doctrine that writing dis orders do not exist in isolation but occur simultaneously and equally often with disorders of speech and the reason why this view has persisted so long is that it is supported by the bulk of clinical experience (Margolin, 1984). Viewed in the light of these observations, the few published reports of the occurrence of pure developmental spelling disability without being accompanied by reading deficits present a paradox. Spelling disability that reportedly exists along with normal reading ability is referred to as "developmental spelling retardation" (Nelson and Warrington, 1974), "unexpected spelling problems" (Frith, 1980), "spelling only retardation" (Jorm, 1983), and "specific spelling problems" (Frith, 1984). Occasionally, a more descriptive lable such as "poor spellers who are good readers" (Frith, 1980, p. 514) is used. The findings of a few recently published neuropsychological studies also suggest a possible dissociation between spelling and reading. One frequently quoted study is by Beauvois and Derouesne (1979) which proposed a dissociation between the phonological route to reading and the phonological route to spelling because the patient was impaired in reading but not in spelling (cf, Temple, 1985a). It should, however, be noted that R.G., the patient studied by Beauvois and Derouesne, committed some spelling mistakes and that "the patient's writing was not entirely normal" 2 R. MALATESHA JOSHI AND P. G. AARON (p. 1120). Other neuropsychological studies claim a dissociation between reading and spelling because the etiology and symptoms of the reading disorder are categorically different from those of the spelling disorder. For instance, Hatfield and Patterson (1983) describe a patient whose oral reading could be interpreted as that of a surface dyslexic but whose spelling was reminiscent of phonological dysgraphia. Temple (1985b) has described a developmental dyslexic who, according to her, was not a surface dyslexic but was a surface dysgraphic. These cases are more fully discussed at the end of this chapter and alternative interpretations are suggested. The existence of some putative adults who are proficient readers but inconsistent spellers is also often cited as evidence of the independence of reading and spelling processes. Hatfield and Patterson (1983) address this "curious discrepancy" between reading and writing skills in normal and even highly literate adults and cite their professional colleague RP. as an example. A possible resolution to the controversy of whether or not spelling and reading are independent processes could be found in a statement by Bryant and Bradley (1980) that they have encountered children of 11 and 12 who read well but spell appallingly but who, later on at around the age of 13, experience serious reading difficulties because they are unable to use phonological strategy to meet the increased demands of reading. In view of this statement, adults who are poor spellers but who, nevertheless, appear to be proficient readers, probably manage to read well by using a whole word visual recognition strategy. If sufficiently well developed, such a strategy can mask the underlying phonological deficit. Such a strategy, however, will fail in spelling because, unlike reading, spelling a word is a recall task and the appropriate letter strings have to be generated on the basis of phonology. If it could be shown that skilled reading could be accomplished in spite of poor spelling ability, it would also demonstrate that the phonological route is not necessary for skilled reading. The implications of such a finding for models of reading are obvious. It will be argued in this paper that such a condition does not exist and that upon close scrutiny, the so-called "good reader but poor speller" does show reading deficiencies at least under some unusual conditions. In addition to these theoretical implications, the relationship between spelling and read ing is of practical value for the reason that if spelling and reading are separable skills, recent developments in early reading instruction that approach reading through writing (Write to Read) are based on insecure foundations. 2. CASE STUDIES Three college students who approached the psychology clinic seeking help