Brain and Language 74, 134–137 (2000)
doi:10.1006/brln.2000.2329, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

NOTES AND DISCUSSION
Dissociation of Pure Korean Words and Chinese-Derivative
Words in Phonological Dysgraphia
Hyanghee Kim and Duk L. Na
Department of Neurology, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of
Medicine, Seoul, Korea
Phonological dysgraphia is a writing impairment, characterized by marked disability to spell pronounceable pseudo-words as opposed to relatively mild reduction
in ability to spell real words. Within the realm of Korean vocabulary, there are two
categories of real words: pure Korean words and Chinese-derivative words. We
present a patient with a history of CVA, resulting in phonological dysgraphia and,
further, a dissociated performance in the aforementioned two categories of real
words. It is suggested that the lexicon for pure Korean words is segregated from
that for Chinese-derivative words.  2000 Academic Press

INTRODUCTION

Korean vocabulary consists of pure Korean words (24.4%), Chinese-derivative words (69.32%), and other foreign words (6.28%) (Kim, 1993).
Whereas pure Korean and foreign words have no corresponding Chinese
characters, Chinese-derivative words can be written either in Chinese ideogram (e.g., ‘‘ ’’ meaning ‘‘east’’) or its corresponding Korean alphabet,
‘‘Hangul’’ (e.g., ‘‘ ’’ for ‘‘east’’) (both ‘‘ ’’ and ‘‘ ’’ are identically pronounced as /tɔ ŋ/). Koreans with a high-school education or higher are able
to discriminate between pure Korean and Chinese-derivative words even
though the words can all be written in Hangul. Hangul is one of several
representative phonetic alphabets in all languages. Furthermore, compared
to English, there is relatively systematic one-to-one correspondence between
a grapheme and a phoneme in Hangul. This allows relatively more accurate
This study was presented at the 34th Academy of Aphasia Conference held on November
2–5, 1996 in London, England.
Address correspondence and reprint requests to Hyanghee Kim, Department of Neurology,
Samsung Medical Center, ILwon-dong, Kangnam-ku, Seoul, Korea 135-710. Fax: 82-2-34100041. E-mail: hkim2b@smc.samsung.co.kr.
134
0093-934X/00 $35.00
Copyright  2000 by Academic Press
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

NOTES AND DISCUSSION

135

error analysis of dyslexia and dysgraphia. Another characteristic feature of
Hangul to be considered is that syllables are visually segmented (that is,
syllabic language) and each segmented syllable contains at least a consonant
and vocalic nucleus. For example, in English, the word ‘‘computer’’ has
three syllables but the word is visually a single unit, which necessitates a
segmentation process upon reading and listening. On the other hand, the
’ /k həm-p h u-t2/, has also three syllacorresponding word in Hangul, ‘
bles but each syllable constitutes a unit unto itself. In this article we present
a Korean aphasia patient with phonological dysgraphia who showed a dissociation in writing performance between pure Korean and Chinese-derivative
words.
CARE REPORT

MC is a 40-year-old right-handed man with a college degree. Currently
he is working as an engineer. Two days prior to admission to Samsung Medical Center, he was found to have right hemiparesis in addition to language
disturbances. He was brought to the emergency room of a local hospital
where the right hemiparesis improved rapidly over a few hours. On the day
of admission, his conversational speech was effortful with mild-severity dysarthria and was interrupted by frequent word-finding episodes. Confrontation
naming was impaired but comprehension and repetition of spoken language
were relatively preserved, suggesting a transcortical motor aphasia. Right
hemiparesis was no longer evident. Reflexes were also normal, as were the
results of sensory examination. A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan
performed 24 h after admission demonstrated a cerebral infarction involving
the left insula and the left basal ganglia (Fig. 1). Except for a history of
smoking for 10 years, the medical evaluation including echocardiography
failed to reveal etiologies for stroke.
METHODS
A list of word (both pure Korean and Chinese-derivative vocabularies) and pseudoword
stimuli was selected based on frequency, imageability, and length. For an accurate error analysis, words with a one-to-one correspondence between phoneme and grapheme were selected.
The task was to write to dictation after repeating each word in order to rule out possible
impairment at the input level.

RESULTS

As illustrated in Table 1, MC’s performance was significantly reduced in
writing pseudowords (average of 74% errors) compared to that of real words
(40%). It is of particular interest that he made more errors with pure Korean
words (50%) than with Chinese-derivative words (29%) across the length
of the stimuli.

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NOTES AND DISCUSSION

FIG. 1. MRI scan of MC indicating a cerebral infraction involving the left insula and the
left basal ganglia.

DISCUSSION

As pointed out by Shallice (1981), phonological dysgraphia is typified by
the gross impairment of the nonlexical route in writing. Even though MC’s
real-word writing skills were also compromised (40% error rate), the error
rate with real words was much lower than that with pseudowords (74%). In
TABLE 1
Percentage of Errors in Writing Chinese-Derivative Words, Pure Korean Words,
and Pseudowords
Chinese-derivative
words
Stimuli comprised of four syllables
Stimuli comprised of three syllables
Stimuli comprised of two syllables
Total across length of stimuli

Pure Korean
words
a

50% (5/10)
66% (6/10)
17% (5/29)
55% (16/29) a
21% (12/57)
33% (19/57)
29% (22/96)
50% (41/96)
40% (32/96)

Pseudowords
80% (8/10)
79% (23/29)
61% (35/57)
74% (66/96)
74% (66/96)

a
Only a limited number of pure Korean stimuli with three and four syllables was available
because most pure Korean words are comprised of compound words.

NOTES AND DISCUSSION

137

writing Korean pseudowords, one may assume that the segmenting process
can be bypassed to go to the writing process of individual speech sounds,
which appear to be two basic operations in the writing of pseudowords (Shallice, 1981). From MC’s real-word writing performance, we postulate that
the error rate in real-word writing can be vocabulary-specific. When only
Chinese-derivative words were considered, the error rate decreased from 40
to 29%. Based on the observed error rate differential between pure Korean
and Chinese-derivative words, it can be postulated that a separate lexicon
for each group of stimuli may exist. What would be the system of the lexicons, then? A closer evaluation of the error pattern revealed that errors in
response to pure-word stimuli are characterized by the assimilation of graph/kwi-t′u-ɾaemes from adjacent syllables in the target word (e.g.,
/kwi-t′wi-ɾa-mi/,
/Ãi-gé m-c h i/ →
/Ãim-gém-c h i/
mi/ →
/to-k′{-bi/ →
/to-g{-p′i/,
/t h i-k′ɯl/ →
/t h i-k h ɯl/). In
,
contrast, errors in response to Chinese-derivative word stimuli showed limited influence of other syllables within the target word. Instead, they included
/ka-Jɐŋ-gyo-juk/ →
/ka-Jokphonemic paragraphia (e.g.,
/po-s h a-bu/ →
/po-s h a-bok/,
/pan-s h ɐŋ/ →
/
gyo-juk/,
pa-s h ɐŋ/). It can be derived from this observation that with pure Korean
words, each word is stored in the lexicon as a whole, no matter how many
syllables the word contains. Thus, any impairment in the lexicon will result
in errors characterized by assimilation patterns within the target word. On the
other hand, with Chinese-derivative words, each syllable containing distinct
meaning might be represented in the lexicon as a separate unit, resulting in
limited assimilation phenomena across the boundary of units in lexicon.
REFERENCES
Kim, K. H. (1993). A discourse on Korean lexicon. Seoul, Korea: Geebmoon-Dang.
Roeltgen, D. P., Sevush, S., & Heilman, K. M. (1983). Phonological agraphia: writing by the
lexical-semantic route. Neurology, 33, 755–765.
Shallice, T. 1981. Phonological agraphia and the lexical route in writing. Brain, 104, 413–
429.