1/6. Chronological progression of a language deficit appearing to be postictally reversible in a patient with symptomatic localization-related epilepsy.A language deficit occurring interictally, with chronological progression, and postictally in a patient with symptomatic localization-related epilepsy, which began at 1.6 years of age, is reported. The patient was a 30-year-old right-handed man whose seizures seemed to originate from the left frontal lobe and to involve the left temporal lobe. The deficit in oral language consisted mainly of features of motor aphasia, including delayed initiation of speech with great effort, echolalic and palilalic tendencies, and word-finding difficulty, but he also showed features of sensory aphasia. Written language had agraphia observed in sensory aphasia, including well-formed letters, paraphasias, neologisms, and paragrammatism. Postictally, the language deficit appeared to be superficially reversible, and evolved from mutism through non-fluent jargon to the interictal level of language. Analysis of the patient's diaries from 10 to 26 years of age disclosed chronologically progressive deterioration of language with paragrammatism, showing an increase of grammatical errors, neologismus, literal and verbal paraphasias and misconstruction of sentences. The results suggest that localization-related epilepsy of presumably left frontal lobe origin causes not only a postictal language deficit but also a slowly progressive deficit of language function.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
2/6. Formal lexical paragraphias in a single case study: how "masterpiece" can become "misterpieman" and "curiosity" "suretoy".Formal lexical errors are relatively rare in the production of aphasic patients. In this study, we report the case of DW, who makes a high proportion of these errors. A few other cases have previously been reported, but DW shows a number of distinguishing characteristics. First, formal lexical errors are made in spelling and not in spoken speech. Second, they are associated with morphological errors and not with semantic errors. Third, they often combine lexical units in ways which are semantically and morphologically illegal. Finally, the majority of morphological errors involve the insertion, rather than the deletion, of suffixes. This pattern can be explained by hypothesizing that DW's errors arise because of confusions among a cohort of lexical neighbors activated top-down from a phonological input and bottom-up from shared letters. One possible cause of the confusions is lack of proper inhibition among lexical competitors.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 4keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
3/6. Relation of aphemia and agraphia.A 49-year-old right-handed man presented with a severe impairment of motor speech output aphemia. Initially, he could make grunting sounds, but was otherwise mute. There was no disturbance of comprehension, and he preferred to communicate by writing. writing was agrammatic with lexical errors and mispellings which improved with the speech disturbance. The writing abnormalities of aphemics emphasize the aphasic nature of this speech abnormality.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 4keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
4/6. Acquired crossed aphasia in a child.A case is reported of acquired aphasia in a 15-year-old right-handed boy, secondary to a right occipitotemporal tumour. He had aphasia, alexia, agraphia and visuospatial disturbances, which persisted after partial removal of the neoplasm. 15 days after surgery he had an episode of left focal seizures, after which the aphasia worsened. One month later he developed severe (global) aphasia associated with rostral extension of the tumour. Although crossed aphasia was previously considered common in children, there are few reports with anatomical confirmation. In the authors' own series of 31 children with acquired aphasia this is the only case of crossed aphasia, an incidence similar to that found in adult cases.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
5/6. Motor aphasia unaccompanied by faciobrachial weakness.Most patients with motor aphasia resulting from lesions of the left frontal opercular region have weakness of the right face and arm. We report a 43-year-old man who suffered mutism and agraphia unaccompanied by right-sided weakness after embolic infarction of Broca's area.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
6/6. Selective kana jargonagraphia following right hemispheric infarction.A strongly right-handed Japanese man showed an unusual writing disorder associated with Broca-type aphasia after suffering a right hemispheric infarction. writing with his right hand produced a fluent output in contrast to his nonfluent speech. The patient's agraphia disproportionately affected the writing of kana (Japanese syllabograms), leaving relatively intact the writing of kanji (Japanese ideograms). His kana agraphia, consisting of substitutions, intrusions, transpositions, and deletions, became apparent as the number of syllables in target words increased. Quantitative analysis of the substitutions in terms of their phonological similarity to the target revealed that most of the substitutions were phonologically dissimilar. Those errors were distributed almost identically for familiar and novel words. Moreover, the errors were observed asymmetrically across the target: more errors occurred near the end than at the beginning of a word. The kana agraphia in association with fluent writing output resulted in kana jargonagraphia. These observations suggest that our patient's selective kana jargonagraphia is best explained by selective damage to the hypothesized kana graphemic buffer and by disinhibition of the motor engrams of writing behavior, both of which resulted from right hemispheric damage.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 9keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |