ABSTRACT Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) or progressive posterior cerebral dysfunction is a neur... more ABSTRACT Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) or progressive posterior cerebral dysfunction is a neurodegenerative disorder initially dominated by disturbances in higher visual functions including object agnosia, prosopagnosia, aiexia, environmental agnosia and Baiint's syndrome. Language, memory, insight and judgement remain relatively preserved until late in the course. The aetioiogy of thls syndrome has been discussed controversially. We report the case of a 34-year-old music teacher who presented with the clinical picture of PCA dominated by a severe apperceptive agnosia. The most striking neuropsychoiogical feature of the syndrome was the complete dissociation between ail forms of visual processing and high level language comprehension. Serial MRI and PET scans demonstrated a moderate bllaterai parieto-occipital atrophy and a severe hypometabolism of the occipito-temporoparietai association cortices (left>right) excluding the primary cortical fields, the frontal lobes, the basal ganglia and the cerebellum. However, the subsequent course showed a rapid deterioration of nearly all cognitive capacities and personailty traits and the development of an aklnetic-rigid syndrome associated with myoclonus. PET now showed a severe hypometabolism of almost ail cortical association areas sparing again the primary motor and visual cortex. At that stage, the clinical diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (Heidenhain's syndrome) was made. Taking into account the recent reports of neuropathoiogicai findings in patients with PCA, our case gives further evidence that PCA is a clinically and aetiologically heterogeneous syndrome rather than a distinct neuropathoiogicai entity.
APA PsycNET Our Apologies! - The following features are not available with your current Browser c... more APA PsycNET Our Apologies! - The following features are not available with your current Browser configuration. - alerts user that their session is about to expire - display, print, save, export, and email selected records - get My ...
A method is described to relate brain morphology and neuropsychological disturbances such as apha... more A method is described to relate brain morphology and neuropsychological disturbances such as aphasia. By mapping lesions with computerized tomography onto a grid model of five brain slices, it is possible to compare aphasiological information and lesion site by data processing, allowing the quantitative and qualitative manipulation of a large number of data. The soundness of the method is investigated in a pilot study on the localization of aphasic disturbances. Data processing was performed on a preliminary group of 70 patients with different aphasic syndromes (Broca, Wernicke, and global aphasics with and without recurring utterances). The results confirmed the findings of older studies, with the typical locus of Wernicke's aphasia being Wernicke's area. In conformity to more recent studies, the main lesion for Broca aphasics was found to be in the insular cortex, with a relatively important participation of the frontal white matter. The implications of this refined method for more vigorous aphasiological and neuropsychological research are briefly indicated.
Most current linguistic and psycholinguistic characterizations of agrammatic production start fro... more Most current linguistic and psycholinguistic characterizations of agrammatic production start from the observation that in spontaneous speech inflectional suffixes are either dropped or substituted by default forms, depending on the morphological structure of the language. So far, little experimental evidence has entered theory construction. In this paper, elicited data of two Italian patients with agrammatic speech are presented. The tasks involved the production of a past participle suffix in different sentence contexts. In Italian, the past participle has to agree in gender and number with the grammatical features of an antecedent noun, pronoun, or empty element. It is shown that both patients mastered the general principles of the agreement rule, and that they could produce correct inflectional suffixes in several tasks. Furthermore, the point of breakdown in their performance was syntactic rather than morphological, namely, when there were no overt morphological cues for the identification of the thematic roles in the sentence. These data cannot be accounted for by theories formulated in terms of the syntactic or postsyntactic deletion of suffixes or the functional elements underlying their realization. At least for the patients in this study, morphological substitutions arose as a result of an impairment in the syntactic processing of content words rather than functors.
This article reports results of a standardization study of the English language version of the Aa... more This article reports results of a standardization study of the English language version of the Aachen aphasia test (EAAT). The EAAT was administered to 135 speakers with and 93 without aphasia. Aphasic speakers were divided into four groups (n= 30) representing ...
... Journal of Communication Disorders Editor: Theodore Glattke Journal of Neurolinguistics Edito... more ... Journal of Communication Disorders Editor: Theodore Glattke Journal of Neurolinguistics Editors: John Marshall & Michel Paradis Cognition Editor: Jacques Mehler Cognitive Science Editor: Robert Goldstone Brain & Language Editor: Harry A. Whitaker For ... Zsolt Csefalvay Ch. ...
Publisher Summary This chapter presents an overview of the cognitive neuropsychological approache... more Publisher Summary This chapter presents an overview of the cognitive neuropsychological approaches to aphasia therapy. The three most widely applied aphasia therapy approaches are the communicative approach, the linguistic approach, and the cognitive approach. Cognitive impairments are described with respect to explicit psycho- and neurolinguistic models. In the major aphasia therapy approaches, different IDH-levels are emphasized. The aim of the communicative approach is to optimize the patient's communicative potential rather than improve his/her linguistic disabilities. The linguistic approach (LA) and the cognitive approach (CA) both address the language impairment directly. Traditional approaches to aphasia therapy research were largely based on clinical studies using the group study paradigm. Weaknesses in these therapies led to a shift from the group study approach to the single case approach and a change of focus on treatment from so-called linguistic or communicative disabilities to that of impaired cognitive language functions. Such cognitive approaches attempt to reliably demonstrate for each single case a causal relation between particular therapy procedures for particular impairments and the subsequent improvement of linguistic performances. In addition, their aim is to provide a theoretical explanation of the relation between cause and effect in order to derive generalizable conclusions on the cognitive learning mechanisms that can be triggered by language therapeutic intervention.
ABSTRACT In the cognitive neurolinguistic literature, several aphasic patients have been describe... more ABSTRACT In the cognitive neurolinguistic literature, several aphasic patients have been described who showed modality-specific difficulties in tasks requiring the processing of polymorphemic words and neologisms. In order to explain the observed error patterns in terms of a model of the lexicon, one has to argue in favour of specialized morphological components for the processing of polymorphemic stimuli, an assumption that is also proposed in some models of generative morphology as well as in the psycholinguistic literature. In experimental cognitive neurolinguistics it has been discussed how further developments within the logogen paradigm can explain functional disorders in processing mono- and polymorphemic words in a unified theory. The following article presents the results of four single case studies with patients clinically classified as agrammatics who showed dissociations of theoretically distinguishable word formation processes. It is discussed which special form of the morpholexical system has to be postulated to fit the experimental findings.
ABSTRACT Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) or progressive posterior cerebral dysfunction is a neur... more ABSTRACT Posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) or progressive posterior cerebral dysfunction is a neurodegenerative disorder initially dominated by disturbances in higher visual functions including object agnosia, prosopagnosia, aiexia, environmental agnosia and Baiint's syndrome. Language, memory, insight and judgement remain relatively preserved until late in the course. The aetioiogy of thls syndrome has been discussed controversially. We report the case of a 34-year-old music teacher who presented with the clinical picture of PCA dominated by a severe apperceptive agnosia. The most striking neuropsychoiogical feature of the syndrome was the complete dissociation between ail forms of visual processing and high level language comprehension. Serial MRI and PET scans demonstrated a moderate bllaterai parieto-occipital atrophy and a severe hypometabolism of the occipito-temporoparietai association cortices (left>right) excluding the primary cortical fields, the frontal lobes, the basal ganglia and the cerebellum. However, the subsequent course showed a rapid deterioration of nearly all cognitive capacities and personailty traits and the development of an aklnetic-rigid syndrome associated with myoclonus. PET now showed a severe hypometabolism of almost ail cortical association areas sparing again the primary motor and visual cortex. At that stage, the clinical diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (Heidenhain's syndrome) was made. Taking into account the recent reports of neuropathoiogicai findings in patients with PCA, our case gives further evidence that PCA is a clinically and aetiologically heterogeneous syndrome rather than a distinct neuropathoiogicai entity.
APA PsycNET Our Apologies! - The following features are not available with your current Browser c... more APA PsycNET Our Apologies! - The following features are not available with your current Browser configuration. - alerts user that their session is about to expire - display, print, save, export, and email selected records - get My ...
A method is described to relate brain morphology and neuropsychological disturbances such as apha... more A method is described to relate brain morphology and neuropsychological disturbances such as aphasia. By mapping lesions with computerized tomography onto a grid model of five brain slices, it is possible to compare aphasiological information and lesion site by data processing, allowing the quantitative and qualitative manipulation of a large number of data. The soundness of the method is investigated in a pilot study on the localization of aphasic disturbances. Data processing was performed on a preliminary group of 70 patients with different aphasic syndromes (Broca, Wernicke, and global aphasics with and without recurring utterances). The results confirmed the findings of older studies, with the typical locus of Wernicke's aphasia being Wernicke's area. In conformity to more recent studies, the main lesion for Broca aphasics was found to be in the insular cortex, with a relatively important participation of the frontal white matter. The implications of this refined method for more vigorous aphasiological and neuropsychological research are briefly indicated.
Most current linguistic and psycholinguistic characterizations of agrammatic production start fro... more Most current linguistic and psycholinguistic characterizations of agrammatic production start from the observation that in spontaneous speech inflectional suffixes are either dropped or substituted by default forms, depending on the morphological structure of the language. So far, little experimental evidence has entered theory construction. In this paper, elicited data of two Italian patients with agrammatic speech are presented. The tasks involved the production of a past participle suffix in different sentence contexts. In Italian, the past participle has to agree in gender and number with the grammatical features of an antecedent noun, pronoun, or empty element. It is shown that both patients mastered the general principles of the agreement rule, and that they could produce correct inflectional suffixes in several tasks. Furthermore, the point of breakdown in their performance was syntactic rather than morphological, namely, when there were no overt morphological cues for the identification of the thematic roles in the sentence. These data cannot be accounted for by theories formulated in terms of the syntactic or postsyntactic deletion of suffixes or the functional elements underlying their realization. At least for the patients in this study, morphological substitutions arose as a result of an impairment in the syntactic processing of content words rather than functors.
This article reports results of a standardization study of the English language version of the Aa... more This article reports results of a standardization study of the English language version of the Aachen aphasia test (EAAT). The EAAT was administered to 135 speakers with and 93 without aphasia. Aphasic speakers were divided into four groups (n= 30) representing ...
... Journal of Communication Disorders Editor: Theodore Glattke Journal of Neurolinguistics Edito... more ... Journal of Communication Disorders Editor: Theodore Glattke Journal of Neurolinguistics Editors: John Marshall & Michel Paradis Cognition Editor: Jacques Mehler Cognitive Science Editor: Robert Goldstone Brain & Language Editor: Harry A. Whitaker For ... Zsolt Csefalvay Ch. ...
Publisher Summary This chapter presents an overview of the cognitive neuropsychological approache... more Publisher Summary This chapter presents an overview of the cognitive neuropsychological approaches to aphasia therapy. The three most widely applied aphasia therapy approaches are the communicative approach, the linguistic approach, and the cognitive approach. Cognitive impairments are described with respect to explicit psycho- and neurolinguistic models. In the major aphasia therapy approaches, different IDH-levels are emphasized. The aim of the communicative approach is to optimize the patient's communicative potential rather than improve his/her linguistic disabilities. The linguistic approach (LA) and the cognitive approach (CA) both address the language impairment directly. Traditional approaches to aphasia therapy research were largely based on clinical studies using the group study paradigm. Weaknesses in these therapies led to a shift from the group study approach to the single case approach and a change of focus on treatment from so-called linguistic or communicative disabilities to that of impaired cognitive language functions. Such cognitive approaches attempt to reliably demonstrate for each single case a causal relation between particular therapy procedures for particular impairments and the subsequent improvement of linguistic performances. In addition, their aim is to provide a theoretical explanation of the relation between cause and effect in order to derive generalizable conclusions on the cognitive learning mechanisms that can be triggered by language therapeutic intervention.
ABSTRACT In the cognitive neurolinguistic literature, several aphasic patients have been describe... more ABSTRACT In the cognitive neurolinguistic literature, several aphasic patients have been described who showed modality-specific difficulties in tasks requiring the processing of polymorphemic words and neologisms. In order to explain the observed error patterns in terms of a model of the lexicon, one has to argue in favour of specialized morphological components for the processing of polymorphemic stimuli, an assumption that is also proposed in some models of generative morphology as well as in the psycholinguistic literature. In experimental cognitive neurolinguistics it has been discussed how further developments within the logogen paradigm can explain functional disorders in processing mono- and polymorphemic words in a unified theory. The following article presents the results of four single case studies with patients clinically classified as agrammatics who showed dissociations of theoretically distinguishable word formation processes. It is discussed which special form of the morpholexical system has to be postulated to fit the experimental findings.
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