Abstract
A case of conduction aphasia was analyzed and reported. The patient was a 67-year-old right handed male. He developed aphasia after having recovered from the first stroke involving the right hemisphere 18 months before. MRI study revealed old subcortical lesions in the right parietooccipital region and a new lesion confined in the left supramarginal gyrus.
Neuropsychologically the patient presented with a typical profile of conduction aphasia, i. e. fluent speech contaminated with literal paraphasias, good comprehension of spoken language, and severe difficulty of repetition.
Three features of the present case were thought to be worth reporting.
First, unlike typical cases reported previously responses in repetition in the present case tended to disintegrate into jargon. Especially there was a tendency that irrelevant series of syllables were added toward the end of a response, making the response unnecessarily longer than a target word. From the phonological analysis of the nature of this type of responses we concluded that difficulty of selection of the number of necessary syllables as well as the correct syllable itself was at the base of this symptom.
Second, the patient had the right hemisphere lesion in addition to the left supramarginal lesion. It was postulated that jargon production was probably enhanced by this right hemisphere lesion. Also the latter lesion was thought to be contributory to the poor recovery of repetition capacity.
Finally the importance of the supramarginal cortical lesion in conduction aphasia was stressed.
