11/14. Difficulty in reaching objects and body parts: a sensory motor disconnexion syndrome.A 19-year-old woman is described who, following an acute episode of eclampsia during pregnancy, displayed a complex neuropsychological syndrome. Along with a mild pattern of conduction aphasia, she showed a severe apraxia, total agraphia, marked constructional disturbances and was unable to reach targets outside and on her body and to perform accurate motor tasks under visual, tactile and proprioceptive control. These symptoms are discussed as the results of a disconnexion syndrome and related to the C.T. scan findings.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
12/14. music and language in degenerative disease of the brain.music and language functions were studied in two musicians with degenerative disease. Both patients were tested on a standardized language battery and a series of music tasks. In the first case with left cortical atrophy and primary progressive aphasia, expressive music functions were spared with impaired reception of rhythm. The second case with posterior cortical atrophy, greater on the right, was nonaphasic, had spatial agraphia, a visuopractic deficit, and severe expressive music deficits, but intact rhythm repetition. The aphasic patient showed dissociations between music and language in fluency and content; continuous, organized, although reiterative music production was contrasted with nonfluent language. The nonaphasic patient showed the opposite pattern of deficits; unmusical production with impaired melody and rhythm organization that was contrasted with fluent, intelligible language. The double dissociation between language and music functions supports the existence of independent cognitive systems, one consistent with conventional left lateralization models of language, temporal sequence, and analytic music processing and another with a right lateralization model of implicit music cognition.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
13/14. Acquired agraphia caused by focal brain damage.Motor and linguistic aspects of writing were evaluated in 31 subjects with focal damage in 1 of 3 regions of the left hemisphere: (1) dorsolateral frontal lobe sparing primary motor cortex (group FL), (2) parietal lobe (group PL), or (3) temporal lobe (group TL). A standard procedure was used to evaluate writing for grapheme formation, spatial arrangement, spelling, word selection, grammar, and perseveration. It was predicted that agraphia would be observed in all 3 groups, and that the most severe impairments would be associated with frontal lobe damage, particularly in aspects of writing dependent on sequencing (grapheme formation, spelling, and grammar). It was found that agraphia was common in all groups, particularly in the acute epoch, and that all groups showed considerable recovery of writing by the chronic epoch. Few differences were found between groups. However, the FL group was impaired on spelling and grammar relative to the PL group in the acute epoch and impaired on grammar relative to the TL group in the chronic epoch. The findings are consistent with the notion that writing relies on a distributed neuroanatomical network, which acts in concert to link fragments of visuomotor activity with component linguistic elements.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 6keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
14/14. 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.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 3.4617641472842keywords = dysgraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
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