LEXICAL WRITING CAN BE NONSEMANTIC AND IT CAN BE FLUENT WITHOUT PRACTICE

We report a stroke patient who cannot write novel nonwords to dictation but who can write many familiar words. We tested her writing to dictation of 15 nonwords that had no distinctive meanings but which she was learning to read aloud. She wrote them fluently at the first attempt. She can also copy nonwords from memory more accurately if they are familiar. Her writing of function words to dictation is poor but better than that of novel nonwords. Function words are copied better than they are read or written to dictation, and better than novel nonwords. Aural comprehension is good and better than in reading. She can report semantic associations that are evoked by concrete nouns and by nonwords that are given a concrete meaning, but not by function words nor by the familiar nonwords used here. These results are evidence for processes that are lexical but not semantic in both writing to dictation and in copying from memory, and for both familiar nonwords and for function words. They also show that lexical writing can be fluent without any practice in writing the particular lexical items concerned.