The Autonomy of Lexical Orthography

Do we need to access the spoken form of a word in order to retrieve the word’s spelling or in order to understand the meaning of its written form? In this paper we focus on the relationship between lexical phonology and orthography specifically in production and we present the case of a neurologically impaired individual who is often unable to provide the correct spoken name of an object although he may be able to write its name correctly. We argue that this evidence is seriously problematic for the hypothesis of obligatory phonological mediation and conclude that orthographic lexical forms can indeed be independently accessed for production without the mediating role of phonology.