Abstract
A case of Luria's semantic aphasia marked by difficulty in decoding sentences involving logico-grammatical relationships was observed in a 72-year-old right-handed woman. Her CT scan disclosed a lesion in the left parietooccipito-temporal region. She developed ideomotor apraxia, ideational apraxia, constructional apraxia, constructional agraphia, acalculia, and minimum right-left-disorientation.
Neuropsychological examinations using the Standard Language Test of Aphasia, Token Test and Vocabulary Test showed that she had good comprehension and could memorize long sentences. The sentences which were difficult for her to comprehend were those having logico-grammatical relationships with double or triple elements, which therefore demanded simultaneous spatial organization.
She decoded these sentences by means of word order. It was believed that she could not understand their actual meaning and comprehended only the meaning of the words in order, independent of syntax or context. The basic psychological disturbance in her behavior, it seemed, was an inability to process incoming information according to its logico-grammatical relationship. In order to understand sentences with a logico-grammatical relationship, simultaneous arrangement of the elements in the sentence is necessary, but the subject was unable to do so because she could not select the main element in the sentense according to the context.
This disturbance was recognized not only in understanding sentences but also symbols, e. g., a watch hand or digits. For example, the meaning of a digit is decided according to its simultaneous spatial arrangement ( 1 signifies one when found to the right side of digit 3 in 31, but ten when found to the left of the same digit in 13). In these instances, she decoded the digits apart from their spatial arrangement. Therefore she was able to calculate no higher than a number with one digit.
These findings suggest the subject was unable to transfer informations with simultaneous spatial organization to the higher symbolic level. This is because, even after she showed improvement in spatial functioning in constructional apraxia and right-lift disorientation, logico-grammatical disturbance was still recognized.
