The Role of External Cues in Korean Mirror Writing

time of language evaluation on the 8th day after onset, the patient manifested relatively fluent utterances, and intact auditory comprehension, repetition, and naming abilities. He was able to read simple, short sentences without mirror reading. However, mirror writing with his intact left hand was observed for individual Korean graphemes when he wrote his name and address spontaneously, and also when he wrote words, phrases, and sentences dictated to him. He was able to acknowledge the difference between mirror and normal writing on twenty pairs of written stimulus cards without any hesitation. He did not have difficulty in drawing figures Dear Sir, In this report, we describe a case of pathological mirror writing involving a right-handed Korean patient with a left basal ganglia lesion. Using his intact left hand, he always initiated writing from the right margin, and each grapheme was written as its mirror image with intact writing sequences. However, with external verbal (‘Please write rightwards from here’) and visual (rightward arrow) cues, he wrote normally from the left edge of the paper. This finding confirms that people with basal ganglia lesions compensate for a malfunction by relying on external cues to guide movements. A particularly interesting observation is that, with only a verbal cue to write rightwards, writing initiated from the left margin produced a vertical script with mirror writing. This phenomenon is noteworthy because it can be observed only in languages with a topto-bottom writing system.