Korean Agraphia Subsequent to Right Hemispheric Lesion

우반구 손상 환자의 한글 실서증 특징

In Hangeul, the graphemes of syllables are organized in horizontal, vertical and mixed (both horizontal & vertical) orientations, and the graphemic position of consonant(s) and vowel(s) within a each syllable needs to be maintained within a square pattern. We investigated the characteristics of writing errors of 9 stroke patients with right hemisphere (RH) lesions and compared it to the performances of 15 normal subjects. The subjects were asked to write to dictation of 90 Korean syllables. One of the interesting findings was that our patients manifested visuospatial errors which are not commonly observed in other language-speaking (e.g., English) patients due to the unique syllabic organizations of Korean writing system. The prominent errors in the RH group could be explained by the impaired RH which normally controls the visuospatial functions.