Graphemic jargon: a case report.

We report on a patient with left hemispheric thromboembolic stroke whose writing performance on single word dictation following recovery from an aphasic syndrome remained severely impaired but fluent. Having only very fragmentary command of the target's written spelling she produced neologistic nonwords which were approximately the same length and contained, in addition to perseverative intrusions and unidentifiable errors multiple insertions, deletions, transpositions, and substitutions but only few unpronounceable combinations. The patient was tested 4 and 10 months postonset, before and after having attended a rehabilitation program for dysgraphia. Comparing pre- and post-rehabilitation error corpora we found, besides a slight improvement of her severe dysgraphia, a highly significant predilection of in-class substitutions regarding the consonant/vowel status of misspelled graphemes. The second error corpus revealed some influence of different consonant/vowel patterns among the targets on the emergence of spelling errors. We discuss the hypothesis of an influence of nonlexical "graphotactic" features on the spelling process as has been revealed by other cases of acquired dysgraphia published in recent years.