1/44. language disorders in landau-kleffner syndrome.In the present long-term study, we analyzed language disorders in four patients with landau-kleffner syndrome. Their common first symptoms were disability in understanding spoken words, followed by inarticulation and a decreased amount of speech. All patients showed auditory verbal agnosia to some degree at some stage of their illness. However, one patient showed typical sensory aphasia as the first symptom, and another patient showed nonverbal auditory agnosia followed by pure word deafness. Thus, patients with landau-kleffner syndrome show sequential and sometimes hierarchical language disorders beginning with sensory aphasia, followed by auditory agnosia, and finally word deafness during their disease process. During long-term follow-up (20 to 30 years), all patients showed marked recovery in language without any intellectual handicap, but with some disability in spoken language, auditory verbal perception, and a discrepancy between Wechsler Verbal and Performance IQ scores.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = disability (Clic here for more details about this article) |
2/44. Spoken language correlates of reading impairments acquired in childhood.This study reports the reading difficulties of five children following unilateral left hemisphere stroke sustained either before or during the early stages of literacy acquisition. Although each of the children experienced a period of disturbed language processing in the initial stages postonset, at the time of testing none of the children were considered to be clinically aphasic. Yet, on a standardized test of oral reading each of the children achieved a reading age that lagged behind chronological age and marked reading impairments were disclosed in four of the five children. A set of standardized and nonstandardized tests, aimed at measuring aspects of cognitive and spoken language processing that are considered to be important for normal reading acquisition, was administered. Where nonstandardized tests were used, performance of each of the stroke children was compared to that of groups of normally developing control children, closely matched for chronological age. A range of residual deficits in cognitive and spoken language processing was disclosed among the five brain-damaged children that appeared to be associated with their reading impairments. Two children had expectedly poor reading due to a selective impairment in verbal IQ; a specific phonological reading disorder was revealed in two children, each of which had a residual impairment to phonological awareness; and delayed reading acquisition was observed in one child with a general language deficit. It is suggested that when a child suffers damage to the left hemisphere in the early stages of reading acquisition, difficulties with learning to read are likely to ensue and may arise as a consequence of an underlying cognitive or linguistic deficit.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1636.6936645284keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
3/44. Language and calculation within the parietal lobe: a combined cognitive, anatomical and fMRI study.We report the case of a patient (ATH) who suffered from aphasia, deep dyslexia, and acalculia, following a lesion in her left perisylvian area. She showed a severe impairment in all tasks involving numbers in a verbal format, such as reading aloud, writing to dictation, or responding verbally to questions of numerical knowledge. In contrast, her ability to manipulate non-verbal representations of numbers, i.e., Arabic numerals and quantities, was comparatively well preserved, as evidenced for instance in number comparison or number bisection tasks. This dissociated impairment of verbal and non-verbal numerical abilities entailed a differential impairment of the four arithmetic operations. ATH performed much better with subtraction and addition, that can be solved on the basis of quantity manipulation, than with multiplication and division problems, that are commonly solved by retrieving stored verbal sequences. The brain lesion affected the classical language areas, but spared a subset of the left inferior parietal lobule that was active during calculation tasks, as demonstrated with functional MRI. Finally, the relative preservation of subtraction versus multiplication may be related to the fact that subtraction activated the intact right parietal lobe, while multiplication activated predominantly left-sided areas.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 125.84525908043keywords = reading, dyslexia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
4/44. The application of cognitive event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in language-impaired individuals: review and case studies.There is a substantial body of basic research that has utilized ERPs to investigate the neurological basis of cognition. This research has, in turn, led to the development of practical applications of cognitive ERPs in patient populations. In particular, recent work has focused on the development of ERP-based assessment measures for the neuropsychological assessment of dyslexia and language impairments secondary to stroke. This review describes the innovative assessment methods program (IAMP), an initiative to utilize ERPs for a neuropsychological assessment of patients who cannot be evaluated by traditional methods. The success of this program has demonstrated that ERPs can be used to reliably evaluate an individual's reading and speech comprehension abilities, independent of behavioral and speech production impediments. In contrast to traditional neuropsychological assessment, these ERP methods can discern the cognitive strategies used by an individual to perform a task.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 125.84525908043keywords = reading, dyslexia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
5/44. Development of the pediatric test of brain injury.OBJECTIVE: The Pediatric Test of Traumatic brain Injury (PTBI) (currently in its research edition) is a tool for assessing the cognitive-linguistic skills of school-aged children and adolescents in acute care and rehabilitation settings after traumatic brain injury. Development of the PTBI was motivated by the fact that, to date, no standardized test has been available to assess the full range of cognitive-linguistic impairments associated with pediatric brain injury. In this article we describe how the research edition of the PTBI was developed, provide rationale for the areas of assessment, discuss a plan for standardization, and illustrate its use with three children with TBI. DESIGN: The PTBI was constructed to sample the attention, memory, language, reading, writing, metalinguistic, and metacognitive skills that are particularly at risk in pediatric brain injury and that are relevant to the general education curriculum. MATERIAL: The test material for the PTBI was selected on the basis of clinical and experimental evidence that children and adolescents with TBI demonstrate a wide range of cognitive and language deficits. These first appear in the early stages of recovery and often persist but change over time. CONCLUSION: Our goal is to standardize the PTBI so it can be used to establish baseline behaviors and track cognitive-linguistic recovery.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 116.90669032346keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
6/44. Late plasticity for language in a child's non-dominant hemisphere: a pre- and post-surgery fMRI study.The ability of the right hemisphere to sustain the acquisition or the recovery of language after extensive damage to the left hemisphere has been essentially related to the age at the time of injury. Better language abilities are acquired when the insult occurs in early childhood (perinatal insults) compared with later occurrence. However, while previous studies have described the neuropsychological pattern of language development in typical cases, the neural bases of such plasticity remain unexplored. Non-invasive functional MRI (fMRI) is a unique tool to assess the neural correlates of brain plasticity through repeated studies, but the technique has not been widely used in children because of methodological limitations. Plasticity of language was studied in a boy who developed intractable epilepsy related to Rasmussen's syndrome of the left hemisphere at age 5 years 6 months, after normal language acquisition. The first fMRI study at age 6 years 10 months showed left lateralization of language networks during a word fluency task. After left hemispherotomy at age 9 years, the child experienced profound aphasia and alexia, with rapid recovery of receptive language but slower and incomplete recovery of expressive language and reading. Postoperative fMRI at age 10 years 6 months showed a shift of language-related networks to the right during expressive and receptive tasks. Right activation was seen mainly in regions that could not be detected preoperatively, but mirrored those previously found in the left hemisphere (inferior frontal, temporal and parietal cortex), suggesting reorganization in a pre-existing bilateral network. In addition, neuropsychological data of this case support the hypothesis of innately more bilateral distribution of receptive than expressive language. This first serial fMRI study illustrates the great plasticity of the child's brain and the ability of the right hemisphere to take over some expressive language functions, even at a relatively late age. It also suggests a limit for removal of the dominant hemisphere beyond the age of 6 years, a classical limit for the critical period of language acquisition.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 118.30639702908keywords = reading, alexia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
7/44. The role of phonological and orthographic information in lexical selection.We report the performance of two patients with lexico-semantic deficits following left MCA CVA. Both patients produce similar numbers of semantic paraphasias in naming tasks, but presented one crucial difference: grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme conversion procedures were available only to one of them. We investigated the impact of this availability on the process of lexical selection during word production. The patient for whom conversion procedures were not operational produced semantic errors in transcoding tasks such as reading and writing to dictation; furthermore, when asked to name a given picture in multiple output modalities--e.g., to say the name of a picture and immediately after to write it down--he produced lexically inconsistent responses. By contrast, the patient for whom conversion procedures were available did not produce semantic errors in transcoding tasks and did not produce lexically inconsistent responses in multiple picture-naming tasks. These observations are interpreted in the context of the summation hypothesis (Hillis & Caramazza, 1991), according to which the activation of lexical entries for production would be made on the basis of semantic information and, when available, on the basis of form-specific information. The implementation of this hypothesis in models of lexical access is discussed in detail.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 116.90669032346keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
8/44. Neuropsychological deficits in a child with a left penetrating brain injury.This case study reports neuropsychological and structural magnetic resonance (MRI) studies of a 10-year-old girl with a left hemisphere lesion, caused by an underwater fishing harpoon penetrating her head when she was 6 years old. The patient showed a marked deficit in the acquisition of reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as an attentional deficit. Magnetic resonance images revealed left cortical lesions in the orbital region and the gyrus angularis, as well as in the caudate and putamen nuclei and longitudinal inferior fascicle. Neuropsychological assessment showed frontal and parietal lobe dysfunctions consistent with the lesional data. The structural data explain the neuropsychological impairment and suggest that, although the left lesion was early and relatively small, plasticity was incomplete.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 116.90669032346keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
9/44. Language function and dysfunction in corticobasal degeneration.OBJECTIVE:S: The authors assessed language functioning in corticobasal degeneration (CBD), an area that has received little systematic study. aphasia has been reported occasionally, and the authors hypothesized that appropriate assessments would reveal at least mild language impairment, particularly affecting phonologic (sound-based) processing, even in cases without frank aphasia. methods: A series of 10 unselected patients with CBD (one with pathologic confirmation) were administered neuropsychological tests assessing the following aspects of cognitive functioning: verbal fluency, naming, reading, oral spelling, auditory-verbal short-term memory, phoneme blending and segmentation, visuospatial skills, and semantic memory. RESULTS: Phonologic and spelling impairments were prevalent, even in nonaphasic patients. The prevalence of visuospatial, constructional, and frontal impairments, demonstrated in previous research, was also replicated. A minority of patients had deficits in semantic memory, naming, and reading, but the impairments were usually mild. CONCLUSIONS: The authors found phonologic impairment to be a typical feature of CBD. There is substantial overlap between progressive nonfluent aphasia and CBD, and the linguistic impairment can be thought of as a continuum, with mild phonologic impairment at one end and severe aphasia at the other.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 233.81338064692keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
10/44. Semantic paralexias facilitated by tachistoscopic reading in a patient with impairment of phonological recoding.This study of a dyslexic patient supports the view that the level of impairment of the phonological route plays a role in the production of semantic paralexias. The patient's reading was based on a defective phoneme-to-grapheme transcoding, in spite of evidence that semantic information was available through non phonological routes. The hypothesis that the residual ability to carry out phonological recoding could block the production of semantic paralexias was confirmed by tachistoscopic reading, assumed to interfere with phonological recoding in this patient, that provoked a definite rise of this type of error. The relationship between the degree of damage of phonological route and the clinical expression of the syndromes of phonological dyslexia and deep dyslexia is also discussed.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 727.71551968844keywords = reading, dyslexia, alexia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
| | Next -> |