Luzzi Simona, Bartolini Marco, Coccia Michela, Provinciali Leandro, Piccirilli Massimo, Snowden Julie S
Department of Neuroscience, University of Ancona, Italy.
Neurocase. 2003 Aug;9(4):285-96. doi: 10.1076/neur.9.4.285.15551.
The dual-route model of writing assumes two basic procedures involved in writing: lexical and non-lexical. The lexical route is fundamental in opaque orthographies such as English; from its impairment surface dysgraphia arises. Evidence for the role of a lexical route in transparent languages such as Italian, which have a regular orthography, has been more limited. We report a case study of ES, an Italian patient suffering from degenerative brain disease, who presented with a selective disorder of writing. He showed the unusual phenomenon of inserting an apostrophe inappropriately in the spellings of words. Neuropsychological evaluation provided evidence of loss of orthographic meaning of the apostrophe and a pattern of writing performance consistent with surface dysgraphia. There was also evidence of an accompanying surface dyslexia. We conclude that examination of apostrophe use provides a valuable means of detecting surface dysgraphia in the Italian language. The findings point to the need for cognitive models of writing to account for "dumb symbols" of language such as the apostrophe. This unique case provides a further example of the variety of clinical presentations of focal cerebral degeneration.
词汇性和非词汇性。词汇通路在像英语这样的非透明正字法中至关重要；其受损会导致表层失写症。在像意大利语这样具有规则正字法的透明语言中，词汇通路作用的证据则较为有限。我们报告了一例对ES的病例研究，ES是一名患有退行性脑疾病的意大利患者，其表现出选择性书写障碍。他出现了在单词拼写中不恰当地插入撇号的异常现象。神经心理学评估提供了证据，证明撇号的正字法意义丧失，以及与表层失写症一致的书写表现模式。同时也有伴随表层失读症的证据。我们得出结论，对撇号使用的检查为检测意大利语中的表层失写症提供了一种有价值的方法。研究结果表明，书写的认知模型需要考虑像撇号这样的语言“无意义符号”。这个独特的病例进一步例证了局灶性脑变性的多种临床表现。
