| Summary: | 碩士 === 長庚大學 === 臨床行為科學研究所 === 94 === As developmental dysgraphia to be a heterogeneous group, and in addition, the underlying mechanisms during writing Chinese are still vague, how to discriminate dysgraphic subtypes lack substantial theoretical and evidential basis. Restrictions in thorough and integrated evaluation or intervention toward the dysgraphic group still remain nowadays. Although few acquired Chinese dysgraphic case reports were published recently, developmental case data in Taiwan is scanty. We tried to present the linkage between writing models and test results and to prove that dysgraphia could mainly result from central processing deficits in writing.
In this thesis, a 9th grade developmental dysgraphic, CYM, and a control group consisted of 25 students matched with CYM on grade, gender, and handedness were recruited. Computerized writing behavioral experiments were executed via SuperLab Pro 2.0 software, including writing to dictation, true word choice task, character delayed copy task, and character immediate copy task. The impact of character frequency, complexity (stroke numbers), and regularity (phonetic and morphological regularity) on the correctness and the time-consumed in character generation were analyzed and discussed.
The mean and standard deviation of the control group in testing were used to plot whether CYM performed better or worse than controls on specific testing items. Descriptive data analyses were to present CYM’s background information, on-task behavior, and writing error analysis.
Results showed that although CYM has intact IQ, attention, memory, visual perception and visual-spatial memory, he still suffers from prominent and age-inconsistent character generation errors. Besides, CYM’s slight incoordinate fine motor ability was insufficient to explain his character errors and long time-consumed even in true word choice task which can be accomplished without motor programming and motor output processing of writing. Therefore, CYM’s writing difficulties might result from the deficit in central processing, according to Chinese writing model, the phonology-to-orthography conversion or orthographic output processes.
Finally, we should also attend to implications of the internal discrepancies in CYM, such as his coding is much worse than other items in WISC-III, and his phonological fluency (in both true words and false words labeled in phonetic notations) is lower than reading accuracy. Whether phonological processing and fluency can be indices of writing ability in addition to accuracy, may be another research question to be find out.
It is urgent and necessary to build up neurobehavioral database of Chinese developmental dysgraphics in Taiwan. Or, on the other hand, explore the predictive factors of the dysgraphic group through longitudinal research so that occupational therapists and educationalists can make efforts in early prevention and early intervention toward this disorder. However, the most important for us to keep in mind is, any evaluation or intervention approach should be based on theoretical concerns of writing processes, and those from central to peripheral would be potentially more systematic and effective.
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