THE AUTONOMY OF LEXICAL ORTHOGRAPHY

Do we need to access the spoken form of a word in order to retrieve th e word's spelling or in order to understand the meaning of its written form? In this paper we focus on the relationship between lexical phon ology and orthography specifically in production and we present the ca se of a neurologically impaired individual who is often unable to prov ide the correct spoken name of an object although he may be able to wr ite its name correctly. We argue that this evidence is seriously probl ematic for the hypothesis of obligatory phonological mediation and con clude that orthographic lexical forms can indeed be independently acce ssed for production without the mediating role of phonology.