aphemia

Stuttering is a repetitive, iterative disfluency of speech, and is usually seen as a developmental problem in childhood. Acquired causes in adults include strokes and medications. When stuttering occurs with seizure-like events, it is usually attributed to psychogenic nonepileptic seizures. We describe an elderly man who experienced personality change and bouts of stuttering, followed by anarthria with preserved writing and then aphasia affecting written and uttered language, and ending with confusion. EEG recordings showed nonconvulsive status epilepticus (NCSE) with focality in the left frontal region followed by bifrontal NCSE...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) is one of the 3 clinical presentations of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), the other 2 being frontotemporal dementia and semantic dementia (SD). PNFA and SD, both representing relentlessly progressive language impairment in the realm of FTLD, may share a large part with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). A salient distinction between PPA and PNFA or SD is that PPA includes another clinical type, namely, logopenic/phonemic aphasia (LPA), which is not represented in FTLD...

In this paper, we review the symptoms associated with damages to the frontal and/or temporal lobes. Similarities and differences between the symptoms observed after a stroke and in frontotemporal lobar degeneration are also discussed. Frontal lobe damages may lead to various apraxic disorders, including limb-kinetic, ideomotor, gait, buccofacial, and ocular motor apraxia. Language dysfunction can arise from perisylvian lesions as well as from extra-perisylvian regions. Broca's aphasia, Wernicke's aphasia, pure word deafness, and aphemia are typical examples of disorders caused by damages to the perisylvian region...

Studies of alexia and agraphia have played important roles in understanding how complex cognitive functions are related to brain structure and activity. Modern interests in brain-behavior relations began during the second half of the 19th century as an outgrowth of flawed correlative studies by neuroanatomist Franz Gall and subsequent clinical-pathological analyses by Jean-Baptiste Boulliaud on speech and the frontal lobes. In 1856, Louis Victor Marcé drew attention to writing disorders and postulated a cerebral faculty for writing...

Modern interests in cognitive assessment began with Franz Gall's early 19th century theory of mental organology and Paul Broca's reports in the 1860s on patients with focal brain injury and aphemia. These workers spurred interest in assessing delimited mental abilities in relation to discrete cerebral areas. With roots in experimental and educational psychology, the intelligence testing movement added assessment tools that could be applied to neurological patients. Early- to mid-20th-century landmarks were Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon's intelligence scale, Howard Knox's nonverbal performance tests, and the intelligence quotient conceived by Lewis Terman and refined by David Wechsler...

OBJECTIVE: To present the case of a 54-year-old man with loss of speech, but with preservation of voluntary facio-lingual motility, language and other cognitive abilities (Broca's aphemia). METHOD: Observation of patient oral communicative abilities and general behavior, neuropsychological assessment and cranial computed tomography. RESULTS: Computed tomography showed a hyperdense lesion in the subcortex of the left precentral gyrus corresponding to Brodmann's area 6 and 44...

OBJECTIVE: To observe the therapeutic effect of cluster-needle stimulation of scalp-points combined with rehabilitation training for apoplectic aphemia. METHODS: A total of 56 outpatients were randomized into control (medication, manicol/ beronald, Ca2+ antagonist, citicoline, etc.) group. rehabilitation (Rehab, visual-listening, articulation and speech training) group and acupuncture [Dingqu: 1 cun and 2 cun parallel to the line joining Baihui (GV 20) and Qianding (GV 21) respectively on the bilateral sides...

No clinical data have yet been presented to show that a lesion localized to the primary motor area (M1) can cause severe transient impairment of articulation, although a motor representation for articulation has been suggested to exist within M1. Here we describe three cases of patients who developed severe dysarthria, temporarily mimicking speech arrest or aphemia, due to a localized brain lesion near the left face representation of the human primary motor cortex (face-M1). Speech was slow, effortful, lacking normal prosody, and more affected than expected from the degree of facial or tongue palsy...

One of the most fascinating and frustrating issues in the priority of discovery in science is over just who, for the first time, went on record in the public forum, either orally at a conference or through a published communication, proclaiming that the faculty of articulate human speech was located in the left, not the right, cortical hemisphere. The disputed paper was purportedly written in 1836 by Marc Dax, who died subsequently in 1837. He was a physician in southern France in the city of Montpellier--far from the medical center of Paris...

Lesions in the left supplementary motor area (SMA) can result in a transcortical motor aphasia with nonfluent spontaneous verbal output and relatively preserved repetition. Reading and writing are proportionally affected. We report a patient with an ischemic lesion in the right SMA. He had impaired articulation and normal repetition plus preserved reading and writing, consistent with an aphemia. This patient supports the dissociation of articulatory fluency and linguistic fluency and suggests that both SMAs affect the initiating of articulatory movements required to produce words whereas the left SMA also affects linguistic aspects of speech...

This article describes the unusual case of a 60-year-old woman suffering from pure progressive aphemia. The fusion of multimodal neuroimaging (MRI, perfusion SPECT) implicated the right frontal lobe, especially the inferior frontal gyrus. This area also showed the greatest functional MRI activation during the performance of a covert phonemic fluency task. Results are discussed in terms of bihemispheric language representation. The fusion of three sets of neuroimages has aided in the interpretation of the patient's cognitive brain dysfunction...

Walter Moxon wrote a well-timed paper in 1866 on aphemia with accompanying right sided hemiplegia. Like many other investigators of this apparent lopsidedness of the articulatory system for human speech. Moxon had to reconcile left hemisphere specialization for this function with the overriding law of symmetry, which for a large sector of the scientific community was a sine qua non of the anatomy and function of high level animal cognition. His reasoning was essentially that since the right dominant hand (and hence the left hemisphere) in some sense led overall bilateral limb movement patterns, that the right side of the tongue would lead whole tongue movement for articulation, the left side following in some mechanical sense...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Aphemia is a disorder with prominent speech abnormality. Since its description by Broca, there has been debate regarding the neuropsychological disorganization underlying aphemia: is aphemia an articulatory disorder or a language disorder? We describe a patient with markedly impaired articulation, but preserved receptive and written language function and buccal-facial coordination. The location of his stroke was in the left precentral gyrus, undercutting a small area of motor and premotor cortex. This case suggests that aphemia can occur as an isolated articulation deficit without language involvement or more widespread bulbar apraxia, and may be a severe form of apraxia of speech...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

INTRODUCTION: The clinical examination of language should form part of the general examination of the mental state in patients with diffuse cognitive disorders, intellectual disorders, disorders of memory, etc. OBJECTIVE: To focus the examination of language towards understanding and classification of linguistic activity, through study of aphasia. DEVELOPMENT: We analyze the semiological diversity of aphasia and most relevant clinical forms using a diagnostic decision tree to consider the clinical, neuropsychological and neuroanatomical characteristics...