Two types of developmental surface dysgraphia: to bee but not to bea

We report on two types of developmental surface dysgraphia. One type, exhibited by 8 participants, is orthographic lexicon surface dysgraphia, which involves an impairment in the orthographic output lexicon, leading to nonword phonologically-plausible misspellings. The other type, shown by 3 participants, is disconnection surface dysgraphia. In this type, the orthographic output lexicon is disconnected from the semantic system and from the phonological input lexicon, but still contributes to spelling via support to the orthographic output buffer, resulting in mainly lexical phonologically-plausible misspellings (writing be as “bee” but not “bea”). The specific localization of the impairment in spelling, in the lexicon or in its connections, allowed us to examine the question of one or two orthographic lexicons; four participants who had a deficit in the orthographic output lexicon itself in writing had intact orthographic-input-lexicon in reading. They made surface errors in writing but not in reading the same words, supporting separate input and output orthographic lexicons.