ABSTRACT
Most of the research that has been done on writing has focused on spelling; that is, on how we are able to remember and produce the string of letters that is accepted as the correct spelling of a particular word. Typical speech has a simple grammatical structure and may lack clear sentence boundaries, is repetitive but rather inexplicit, is informal, and contains many pauses, ums, ers and false starts. Speech and writing may share common processes as far as initial planning and sentence construction are concerned, but there must come a point where the few streams diverge, with speech leading to the articulation of phonemes and writing to the production of letters. Cognitive models of spelling postulate a lexical store dedicated to retaining the spellings of familiar words. Patients with "deep dysgraphia" make semantic errors when attempting to write words to dictation or to a write the names of objects.
