THE CONTRIBUTION OF ATTENTIONAL MECHANISMS TO AN IRREGULARITY EFFECT AT THE GRAPHEMIC BUFFER LEVEL

This study analyzes acquired dysgraphia observed in a French-speaking woman. The results point to an impairment of tile graphemic buffer, i. e., the processing stage where abstract orthographic representations a re temporarily stored while planning the written production. However, the spelling errors were more frequent in the irregular than in the re gular words. A qualitative analysis of the errors in the irregular mis spelled words showed that. in general, these were not ''regularization '' errors, but rather the same characteristics as the phonologically i mplausible errors found in the regular words, such as letters substitu tions, deletions, additions, and transpositions. Furthermore, in a lis t of regular and irregular words of same length and graphemic structur e, the errors not only tended to concentrate on the irregularity itsel f but also tended to be more frequent elsewhere in the irregular words compared to the regular words. These finding are discussed in terms o f a post-lexical sensitivity to irregular spelling. It is also shown t hat when focusing attention on the irregularity becomes necessary, thi s can cause a detriment to the surrounding graphemic constituents. Int eraction between attentional resources and processing of orthographic representations at the graphemic buffer level is considered. (C) 1998 Academic Press.