1/29. Supplementary motor area aphasia: a case report.A 72-year-old right-handed woman developed aphasia after a left supplementary motor area (SMA) infarct. She had a right hemiparesis, more paretic on the leg, a tendency to look to her left, and loss of spontaneity. Neuropsychological deficits were mainly in the initiation of language production. She did not speak spontaneously, but responded and articulated well to questions. She named objects correctly when presented, and could repeat words, phrases, and sentences well. She had a difficulty in reading aloud, writing spontaneously and writing to dictation, but preserved the ability to copy written material. This is another rare case of SMA aphasia.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
2/29. When does a deep dyslexic make a semantic error? The roles of age-of-acquisition, concreteness, and frequency.Semantic reading errors are the central and defining feature of deep dyslexia. This study compared the words the deep dyslexic patient LW read correctly with those she omitted and those to which she produced semantic errors in terms of their concreteness, age-of-acquisition, frequency, and length. Semantic errors were made to less concrete, later-acquired, and shorter words than were read correctly; there was no reliable effect of word frequency. More importantly, the actual semantic errors produced were later-acquired than the stimulus words, but they were not more concrete or reliably more frequent. These results implicate age-of-acquisition in the process that produces semantic errors. It is proposed that concreteness determines the specificity of the semantic system to activate a set of candidate responses and that age-of-acquisition biases the ease with which certain words can be selected from this set to be produced as reading responses.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 5.8257448054055keywords = dyslexia, reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
3/29. Intensive training of phonological skills in progressive aphasia: a model of brain plasticity in neurodegenerative disease.Three patients with a typical syndrome of nonfluent primary progressive aphasia (Mesulam's syndrome) were trained daily with a remediation protocol including auditory exercises specifically designed to involve several aspects of phonological processing, a domain known to be specifically affected in the condition. The speech content of the exercises was based on the temporal theory of phonological processes according to which increasing the duration of formant transition should facilitate phoneme discrimination and phoneomic awareness. Significantly improved performance on the trained tasks was demonstrated in the three patients. Improvement further generalized to other tasks such as nonword repetition and reading. We conclude that such results (1) argue for using intensive focused therapy of language impairment in neurodegenerative disorders, (2) may constitute a good model of brain plasticity in neurodegenerative disorders in general, and (3) support theories of phonological processing emphasizing temporal features of the auditory signal.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
4/29. Stimulus-specific neglect in a deep dyslexic patient.We report a patient (B.V.) who appears to suffer from two dyslexic disorders. First, B.V. showed a severe impairment in reading aloud nonwords (e.g., reading TREST as TREE), in addition to making several semantic errors when reading aloud words (e.g., reading ILL as SICK) and in picture naming (e.g., responding KNIFE to a picture of a FORK). These results suggest that B.V. suffers from deep dyslexia. Second, B.V. showed an impairment in reading the final letters of both words and nonwords (e.g., reading SHOWN as SHORT and reading PROGE as PROOF). Thus, it appears that B.V. also suffers from neglect dyslexia. We discuss how these two forms of dyslexia could be interacting to account for B.V.'s pattern of errors in reading aloud words and nonwords and in picture naming.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 19.477234416217keywords = dyslexia, reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
5/29. Symptomatic epilepsy with facial myoclonus triggered by language.We report on a patient with a left frontal lesion who, many years after an injury, developed non-fluent aphasia and facial myoclonic jerks triggered by speaking and listening to spoken language. At age 57, the patient first noted that he would begin to stutter when delivering lectures at conferences. The stuttering would worsen if he continued talking. The video-polygraphic EEG recording shows brief paroxysms of spikes and polyspikes, followed by a slow wave, more evident in the left fronto-temporal region. The myoclonic jerks originating from the submental area correlate with EEG abnormalities. Clinically, these jerks determined a form of stuttering. The triggering factors were reading, speaking and listening to spoken language. This case had several characteristic features: facial myoclonus was the only seizure type experienced by the patient; the seizures and language impairment had a very late onset--about 50 years after the traumatic event that produced a dramatic lesion in the left fronto-polar region. (Published with videosequences.)- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
6/29. Lexical representation and processing of morphologically complex words: evidence from the reading performance of an Italian agrammatic patient.The study of patients with acquired language disorders has provided crucial evidence for contemporary theories on mental lexical representation. This is particularly true for the representation of morphologically complex words. In this paper we analyzed the performance of a patient (M.B.) affected by agrammatism and dyslexia. M.B. was required to read aloud simple and morphologically complex words. The patient's pattern of errors was interpreted as the result of a predominant use of the lexical routine (phonological dyslexia). Three reading tasks were developed which allowed us to test M.B.'s ability to read morphologically complex words (reading of regular and irregular plurals; reading of high- and low-frequency singular and plural nouns; reading of evaluative suffixes). Errors were determined by frequency effect rather than by type of suffix (i.e., inflectional or derivational). High-frequency morphologically complex items seemed to meet stored representations, thus avoiding the parsing procedures that are required for less frequent items. These results are in keeping with dual route models of lexical representation of morphologically complex words.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 15.651489610811keywords = dyslexia, reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
7/29. Deep dysphasic performance in non-fluent progressive aphasia: a case study.We present a patient (PW) with non-fluent progressive aphasia, characterized by severe word finding difficulties and frequent phonemic paraphasias in spontaneous speech. It has been suggested that such patients have insufficient access to phonological information for output and cannot construct the appropriate sequence of selected phonemes for articulation. Consistent with such a proposal, we found that PW was impaired on a variety of verbal tasks that demand access to phonological representations (reading, repetition, confrontational naming and rhyme judgement); she also demonstrated poor performance on syntactic and grammatical processing tasks. However, examination of PW's repetition performance also revealed that she made semantic paraphasias and that her performance was influenced by imageability and lexical status. Her auditory-verbal short-term memory was also severely compromised. These features are consistent with 'deep dysphasia', a disorder reported in patients suffering from stroke or cerebrovascular accident, and rarely reported in the context of non-fluent progressive aphasia. PW's pattern of performance is evaluated in terms of current models of both non-fluent progressive aphasia and deep dysphasia.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
8/29. Selective impairment of lexical stress assignment in an Italian-speaking aphasic patient.Psycholinguistic speech production models assume that lexical stress is stored and accessed separately during phonological encoding. We address the questions of the storage and computation of lexical stress in a case study of an Italian-speaking patient with an impairment of lexical stress assignment in naming, reading, and repeating single words. The patient's stress error pattern and his performance on tasks examining lexical stress in perception suggest an impairment in the retrieval of the stress pattern of irregular words. In contrast, his assignment of stress to nonstored phonological forms suggests that the computation of stress is unimpaired.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
9/29. Why is "red cross" different from "Yellow Cross"?: a neuropsychological study of noun-adjective agreement within Italian compounds.This study investigates the performance of two Italian nonfluent aphasic patients on noun-adjective agreement in compounds and in noun phrases. A completion, a reading, and a repetition task were administered. Results show that both patients were able to correctly inflect adjectives within compounds, but not in noun phrases. Moreover, they were sensitive to constituent order (noun-adjective vs adjective-noun) within noun phrases, but less so within compounds. These results suggest differential processing for compounds as compared to noun phrases: While the latter require standard morphosyntactic operations that are often impaired in aphasic patients, the former can be accessed as whole words at the lexical level.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
10/29. When more yields less: speaking and writing deficits in nonfluent progressive aphasia.Fourteen patients with nonfluent progressive aphasia (NFPA) performed a picture description task in both spoken- and written-output conditions, as well as tests of confrontation naming, spelling to dictation and reading aloud of single words and text. Relative to controls, the patients' spoken and written picture descriptions were reduced in length, speed and amount of information. Of particular interest, and accounting for the first part of the article's title, was a pervasive pattern of poorer spoken and written output associated with the requirement to produce more; this was true when 'more' meant either (a) longer vs. shorter single words or (b) connected language vs. single words. Deficits in spoken and written naming were largely parallel and modality-specific output impairments (such as dysarthria in speech or letter-formation problems in writing) seemed to account for the minority of cases who exhibited a discrepancy. Most patients showed no evidence of agrammatism or reduced verb production in their speech, which typically had normal proportions of content and function words as well as nouns and verbs. By contrast, some degree of telegraphic output was observed in the written narratives of a number of patients. Our results argue against several candidates for the main functional locus of impairment in NFPA, but it is likely that deficits in grammatical processing, working memory, planning/executive skills, speech motor abilities and phonological processing all play a role.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
| | Next -> |