LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 12 : 8 August 2012
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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

Swapna Sebastian, Ph.D.
Shyamala Chengappa, Ph.D.
Achamma Ballraj, MS., DLO

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.

Key words: bilingual aphasia, phonological agraphia, Wernickes aphasia

Introduction

Aphasia, which is an acquired language disorder caused by brain damage is often associated with alexia and agraphia. Phonological agraphia is thought to be caused by a selective impairment in associating input phonological representations with output orthographic representations and, thereby, a forced reliance on lexical memory for accessing orthographic word-form representations. (Martin 1998). Because persons with phonological agraphia rely on lexical information in writing, they usually show errors in writing affixes and nonwords, which presumably are not stored in the mental lexicon, and in writing low-frequency words, for which the access to the lexicon is less efficient. (Martin 1998). There are very few cases reported where comparison is made between sight spelling and sound spelling.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Swapna Sebastian, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Audio Vestibular Unit, Department of ENT
Christian Medical College
Vellore- 632004
Tamilnadu
India
swapna_santhosh@yahoo.co.in

Shyamala Chengappa, Ph.D.
Professor & Head
Department of Speech Language Pathology
All India Institute of Speech and Hearing
Manasagangothri
Mysore 570 006
Karnataka
India
shyamalakc@yahoo.com

Achamma Ballraj , MS., DLO
Professor and Head
Department of ENT
Christian Medical College
Vellore 632004
Tamilnadu
India
abalraj@cmcvellore.ac.in
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