1/17. Fluent aphasia in children: definition and natural history.We compared the course of a preschool child we followed for 4 years with published reports of 24 children with fluent aphasia. Our patient spoke fluently within 3 weeks of the injury. She was severely anomic and made many semantic paraphasic errors. Unlike other children with fluent aphasia, her prosody of speech was impaired initially, and her spontaneous language was dominated by stock phrases. Residual deficits include chronic impairment of auditory comprehension, repetition, and word retrieval. She has more disfluencies in spontaneous speech 4 years after her head injury than acutely. School achievement in reading and mathematics remains below age level. attention to the timing of recovery of fluent speech and to the characteristics of receptive and expressive language over time will permit more accurate description of fluent aphasia in childhood.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = phrase (Clic here for more details about this article) |
2/17. Dynamic aphasia: the selective impairment of verbal planning.A single case study of a patient, ROH, who had a space occupying lesion in the left frontal lobe is reported. His selective speech disorder had all the hallmarks of a dynamic aphasia. Tests of sentence completion, phrase generation and sentence generation were administered. His ability to generate sentences was significantly better given a pictorial context than a verbal context. Although he could order a sequence of pictures, he had the greatest difficulty in ordering the constituent words of a sentence. Luria's hypothesis that dynamic aphasia is due to an impairment of inner speech which provides "the linear scheme of a sentence" is discussed. It is concluded that dynamic aphasia does not reflect a deficit of language processing but rather the selective impairment of verbal planning.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = phrase (Clic here for more details about this article) |
3/17. Processing of visual syntax in a globally aphasic patient.A globally aphasic patient was trained on a computerized visual communication system. His ability to comprehend reversible locative prepositional phrases after training was studied and compared with the performance of Broca's aphasics on a similar task. This patient's ability to generalize symbols for actions was also investigated. The results demonstrate our patient's capacity to master a formal visual syntax in the absence of natural language and illustrate how this capacity may be used successfully in a visual communication system. A problem in generalizing symbols for actions is demonstrated, suggesting that certain heuristic and cueing capabilities in the approach may be helpful.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = phrase (Clic here for more details about this article) |
4/17. Dysprosody in Broca's aphasia: a case study.A detailed acoustic analysis of timing, intensity, and fundamental frequency (F0) at different levels of linguistic structure was conducted on the speech output of a Broca's aphasic who was a native speaker of Thai. Timing was measured with respect to syllables, phrases, and sentences in connected speech. Intensity variation at the sentence level was measured in connected speech. F0 variation associated with the five Thai tones was measured in both isolated words and connected speech. Results indicated that timing was differentially impaired depending upon complexity of articulatory gesture and size of the linguistic structure. Timing, as well as intensity, was aberrant at the sentence level. In contrast, F0 contours of the five tones were spared at all levels of linguistic structure. Findings are interpreted to support the view that dysprosody in Broca's aphasia is more applicable to speech timing than to F0.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = phrase (Clic here for more details about this article) |
5/17. Agrammatism in sentence production without comprehension deficits: reduced availability of syntactic structures and/or of grammatical morphemes? A case study.A French-speaking patient with Broca's aphasia--following a left-hemisphere lesion involving the sylvian region but sparing Broca's area--is presented. Like G. Miceli, A. Mazzuchi, L. Menn, and H. Goodglass's (1983, brain and language, 19, 65-97) case 2, this patient produces agrammatic speech in the absence of any comprehension deficit. Unlike Miceli's patient, though, agrammatic speech can be observed in all sentence production tasks (from spontaneous speech to repetition, oral reading, and writing) whereas production of individual words--be they open class or closed class--is almost always intact. On the basis of extensive (psycho)linguistic testing, it is argued that this patient's deficit is not central and not crucially syntactic (at least) at the level of knowledge but seems to disrupt specifically those (automatic?) processes responsible for both retrieval and production of free-standing grammatical morphemes whenever they have to be inserted into phrases and sentences.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = phrase (Clic here for more details about this article) |
6/17. Understanding: a function of short-term memory?We describe our investigations of the sentence comprehension abilities of 2 patients with a severe impairment in their auditory verbal short-term memory (conduction aphasia). Both were capable of comprehending a range of sentences, even when adequate comprehension was dependent upon the processing of order-dependent syntactic information rather than the utilization of semantic knowledge. Thus they performed satisfactorily on tests using plausibly reversible subject and object constituents with either active or passive verb phrases or prepositional phrases. Both, however, were impaired on sentences which departed from normal conversational conventions in terms of their reference to the order of event occurrence, or to the subject and object of an array. They were also very poor at performing comparative judgements, even when these involved a simple intrinsic attribute such as colour. These findings are discussed in terms of the role of auditory verbal short-term memory in backing up and back-tracking over spoken information when conditions preclude the immediate understanding of auditory-verbal information.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 2keywords = phrase (Clic here for more details about this article) |
7/17. Temporal speech characteristics associated with anterior left hemisphere cortical and subcortical lesions: a preliminary case study report.There is disagreement in the literature regarding the characteristics of cortical and subcortical forms of aphasia. M. L. Albert, H. Goodglass, N. A. Helm, A. B. Rubens, and M. P. Alexander (Clinical Aspects of Dysphasia, Vienna/new york: Springer-Verlag, 1980) state that the two are indistinguishable. The opposing view has been presented by M. A. Naeser, M. P. Alexander, N. Helm-Estabrook, H. L. Levine, S. A. Laughlin, and N. Geschwind (archives of neurology, 39, 1982) and A. R. Damasio, H. Damasio, M. Rizzo, N. Varney, and F. Gersh (archives of neurology, 39, 15-20, 1982), who suggest that subcortical aphasias are not adequately described by the classic, cortical aphasia descriptions. In this study the temporal speech characteristics of a neurologically normal individual, an aphasic patient with anterior cortical and subcortical lesion locus, and a second aphasic patient, whose lesion was limited to anterior subcortical structures, were studied utilizing acoustic analysis of isolated word and phrase productions. The results of this investigation showed individually unique temporal patterns in the speech of each of the subjects studied. While the results must be interpreted conservatively due to the small number of cases described, they do provide tentative support for the Naeser et al. (1982) and Damasio et al. (1982) position. Furthermore, the results demonstrate the potential value of combining sensitive radiographic and acoustic measures in future studies that seek to compare cortical and subcortical forms of aphasia.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = phrase (Clic here for more details about this article) |
8/17. Category specificity in an agrammatic patient: the relative impairment of verb retrieval and comprehension.We report our investigations of a severely agrammatic patient (ROX). A striking feature of ROX's spontaneous speech was his extremely abnormal verb phrase constructions. We established that ROX was impaired both in the retrieval and in the comprehension of action names and verbs which contrasted with his generally excellent comprehension and retrieval of nouns. First we describe his impaired performance on certain sentence comprehension tests. Secondly we document his deficits in naming common actions and our attempt to remedy his impairment. Thirdly we investigate his comprehension of semantically and thematically related nouns and verbs. ROX's agrammatism is discussed from the perspective of category specificity. It is argued that his semantic representation of verbs is impaired, and that this lexical deficit may well be at the core of this type of agrammatism.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = phrase (Clic here for more details about this article) |
9/17. Espousing melodic intonation therapy in aphasia rehabilitation: a case study.A program of Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) was adapted as a home training procedure to enable a severely affected aphasic adult to respond to 52 simple questions bearing relevance to his daily life. MIT involves embedding short phrases or sentences in a simple, non-distinct melody pattern. As the patient progresses through the program, the melodic aspect is faded and the program eventually leads to production of the target phrase or sentence in normal speech prosody. The present procedure consisted of three levels of training designed to advance the subject from an initial level of intoning responses in a simple melody to producing the responses in normal speech prosody. The subject's wife was trained to administer MIT both in the clinical and home settings. Considerable improvement was obtained in imitation and in context related responses to questions. These findings lend support to the proposal that the music dominance to the right hemisphere assists, and perhaps diminishes the language dominance of, the damaged left hemisphere. The limitations of use of Melodic Intonation Therapy were discussed.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 2keywords = phrase (Clic here for more details about this article) |
10/17. Retraining in literal alexia: substitution of a right hemisphere perceptual strategy for impaired left hemispheric processing.An adult patient with literal alexia, agraphia, slight anomia, and dyscalculia due to a left hemisphere infarct showed lack of sequential skills while pattern recognition remained intact. Some words were recognized as patterns, but could not be read phonetically. Therapy concentrated on forming an association of the visual pattern of the complete word with the retained auditory pattern. In this way the patient learned to read several hundred words and short phrases, even as anomia worsened. The patterns learned could not be generalized to noun declension or verb conjugation, or broken into smaller words. This learning process is characteristic of right hemispheric skills which were utilized as left hemispheric functions deteriorated.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = phrase (Clic here for more details about this article) |
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