Phonological dysgraphia in bilingual aphasia: evidence from a case study of Greek and English

Abstract

Background: Acquired phonological dysgraphia refers to impaired spelling of nonwords with preserved spelling of familiar words as well as effects of grammatical class on word spelling with nouns spelled better than verbs. Despite the reports of acquired phonological dysgraphia in different languages, no study has investigated acquired phonological dysgraphia in a bilingual speaker. Aims: Our aim is to test the hypothesis that patterns of spelling impairment should be similar in each language for AA who is a highly proficient bilingual Greek-English speaker with phonological dysgraphia in each language. Methods & Procedures: Phonological dysgraphia was assessed using tasks of spelling to dictation with familiar words, nonwords and verbs and nouns in each language. Outcomes & Results: AA was impaired on tasks that require the knowledge of phoneme to grapheme correspondences in both Greek and English resulting in impaired nonword spelling. In English, nouns were spelled better than verbs; however, the reverse pattern was seen in Greek, with verbs spelled better than nouns. Conclusions: Differential effects of grammatical class on spelling across languages in bilingual phonological dysgraphia reveal that the linguistic constraints of each language have an impact on spelling via a lexical–semantic spelling pathway.