The autonomy of the orthographic pathway in a shallow language: Data from an aphasic patient

This paper reports the case of a Spanish monolingual aphasic patient, JD, w ho showed a severe impairment in language production. Overall, the patient' s difficulties were much more severe in oral than in written production. Th is study was an attempt to test whether writing without phonological mediat ion is possible in a shallow orthography such as Spanish. The results sugge st that even in Spanish, despite its orthographic and phonological transpar ency, there are two writing routes, one based on the phonological represent ations of words and the other based on a direct access from semantic to the orthographic representations of words. The role played by each route seems to depend on the strategy used by the writer.