Phonological agraphia and the lexical route in writing.

A new agraphia syndrome is described in which the patient can write certain classes of words virtually perfectly but is very poor at writing non-words. It is shown that this difficulty cannot be explained by perceptual or memory problems. A number of aspects of the syndrome are shown to correspond to those of phonological alexia within the acquired dyslexias. It thus appears that agraphia syndromes can be analysed by methods analogous to those recently developed for the study of the acquired dyslexias.