REPRESENTATIONAL PROPERTIES COMMON TO PHONOLOGICAL AND ORTHOGRAPHIC OUTPUT SYSTEMS

Linguistic and psycholinguistic research over the last decade has prov ided a wide array of evidence indicating that the mental representatio ns of spoken word forms are highly structured objects. One prominent a spect of the enriched notion of phonological structure is that the rep resentation of segmental length (quantity) is separate from that of se gmental identity; and another is that segmental sequences are organize d into prosodic constituents. This paper discusses data from acquired dysgraphia which suggest that certain attributes of phonological forms also hold of orthographic forms as well - including the skeletal repr esentation of quantity and the grouping of segments into syllabic cons tituents. E.g., the geminate letters ee and tt in orthographic forms l ike career and butter are represented and processed as single graphemi c objects that are associated with two CV units on a tier that encodes quantity. It is argued that such properties of phonological and ortho graphic form reflect general conditions imposed on lexical representat ion, and not modality-specific representational constraints.