Acquired dysgraphia in alphabetic and stenographic handwriting.

We report the unusual case of AZO, who professionally used handwritten shorthand writing, and became dysgraphic after a stroke. AZO suffered from a complex cognitive impairment, and part of her spelling errors resulted from damage to auditory input processing, to phonology-orthography conversion procedures and to the ortographic output lexicon. However, analysis of her writing performance showed that the same variables affected response accuracy in alphabetic and shorthand writing; and, that the same error types, including transpositions, were observed in all tasks in the two types of writing. These observations are consistent with damage to the graphemic buffer. They suggest that, in multiple-code writing systems (e.g., stenography, Japanese, or in the case of multilingual speakers of languages that use different spelling codes), the graphemic buffer is shared by all codes.