The orthographic buffer in writing Chinese characters: evidence from a dysgraphic patient.

We investigated the postlexical processes in writing Chinese characters by studying the delayed copying performance of a Chinese dysgraphic patient, W.L.Z. His delayed copying difficulty could not be attributed to peripheral motor deficit and could not be readily explained by lexical or semantic factors. Instead, the copying performance was sensitive to a word length variable (number of logographemes), and the most prevalent errors were logographeme substitutions. Furthermore, in the substitution errors, the target logographemes and responses tended to share visual/motoric attributes. We propose that the delayed copying difficulty reflects a deficit to the buffering component in writing (coined "logographeme output buffer"), and the universality and language-specific features of the output buffer in writing are discussed.