Higher Brain Function Research
Online ISSN : 1880-6716
Print ISSN : 0285-9513
ISSN-L : 0285-9513
Volume 13, Issue 4
Displaying 1-7 of 7 articles from this issue
Original article
  • Minoru Matsuda, Hideko Mizuta, Kenji Hara, Isami kumakura
    1993 Volume 13 Issue 4 Pages 279-287
    Published: 1993
    Released on J-STAGE: June 14, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
        Three cases with transcortical sensory aphasia were repoted. The language features in these 3 cases included fluent speech, intact repetition, anomia, disturbance in auditory word comprehension, and alexia and agraphia of Japanese idiographic characters (Kanji). The dissociation of poor lexical system from intact phonological and syntactic functions was emphasized. It was suspected that bilateral hemisphere damages play an important role in persistent impairment in auditory word comprehension. In addition, the result of lexical decision task showed the different nature of word comprehension disorder between the first case and the other two cases.
    Download PDF (1627K)
  • Hisako Saida, Yuri Fujiwara, Toru Yamamoto
    1993 Volume 13 Issue 4 Pages 288-295
    Published: 1993
    Released on J-STAGE: June 14, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
        We report on an 80-year-old, right-handed woman, who unintentionally read aloud the characters coming in her sight. The patient experienced a sudden-onset of muteness and right hemiparesis that was more severe in her lower extremity. When the patient was transferred to our hospital one month after the ictus she showed depressed spontaneity and mixed transcortical aphasia with an echolalic tendency. As she became more active and her aphasia improved to a transcortical motor type, we observed more frequently the unintentional reading phenomenon : the patient apparently unintentionally read aloud phrases in the calendar, newspaper, stamps, and so on whenever during examination or speech therapy. We considered this unusual phenomenon to be comparable to “compulsive reading phenomenon (Tamaru et al 1986)” or “visual echolalia (Hadano et al 1988).” MR images of her brain revealed a hematoma that was confined to the medial frontal region involving the supplementary motor area. This lesion was much smaller than those of the 6 cases of echolalic reading reported by others. We suggest that this site was closely related to her unintentional reading phenomenon.
    Download PDF (1442K)
  • Yoko Sano, Masahiro Kato, Akira Uno, Tomoyuki Kojima
    1993 Volume 13 Issue 4 Pages 296-305
    Published: 1993
    Released on J-STAGE: June 14, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
        The presence of thalamic and putaminal aphasia was proposed some time ago with the putative foci in the thalamus and the basal ganglia. However, a general consensus has not been reached in designating the thalamus and putamen as the actual foci responsible for this clinical entity. In the present study, we observed aphasic symptoms in 55 right-handed patients with lesions in the left hemisphere, with recognized major foci in the nucleus lentiformis or thalamus detected on x-ray and MRI-CT. From this study, we arrived at the following conclusions:
        1. Patients with foci localized in the nucleus lentiformis did not exhibit persistent aphasic symptoms. On the other hand, most patients with the foci spreading to the arcus fasciculus, subcortical region, or cerebral cortex or with dilatation of the lateral ventricle, suffered from persistent aphasic symptoms.
    These findings appeared to negate the possibility of the nucleus lentiformis acting as the putative focus.
        2. On some occasions patients with thalamic lesions exhibited very mild language disorders. However, these differed in nature from aphasic symptoms. It is probable that the former can be explained by a disturbance of vigilance.
        3. It might be necessary to re-examine terminology such as putaminal and thalamic aphasias.
    Download PDF (1742K)
  • Yoshiko Mabuchi, Satoshi Okuda, Nobuyuki Murakami, Eiichi Ito, Toshihi ...
    1993 Volume 13 Issue 4 Pages 306-312
    Published: 1993
    Released on J-STAGE: June 14, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
        A 64-year-old right-handed man developed right hemianopsia, disturbance of color naming, alexia without agraphia and visual agnosia following a stroke attack.
        Brain CT and MRI showed infarctions in the distributions of the left posterior cerebral artery, involving the splenium of the collupus callosum and the stem of the left temporal lobe.
        The patient experienced difficulty naming familiar objects or their pictures and could not describe how to use them. However, he was able to distinguish one picture from another and to copy those pictures. Also, as soon as an appeal was made to his understanding through another sense such as auditory or tactile, he could recognize and name the object correctly. These features of his visual disturbance were consistent with associative visual agnosia as proposed by Lissauer.
        The mechanism of the patient's visual agnosia might be explained on the basis of the disconnection theory advocated by Geschwind. But we cannot exclude the possible effects of lesions in the right posterior lobe which are too small to be visible on CT or MRI, and so more cases like this are needed in order to recognize the mechanism of visual agnosia definitively.
        The present case may provide evidence that associative visual agnosia can develop on unilateral lesions of the left hemisphere with callosal lesions.
    Download PDF (1122K)
  • Akemi Inoue, Kazuyuki Obikawa, Sumio Tsuzuki, Toshihiko Hamanaka
    1993 Volume 13 Issue 4 Pages 313-322
    Published: 1993
    Released on J-STAGE: June 14, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
        This paper describes speech characteristics of two cases of acquired stuttering due to brain damage In case 1, the acquired stuttering occurred after a closed head injury, while in case 2 it occurred after a cerebro ascular accident. Speech samples were analyzed according to the classification scheme for developmental stuttering devised by the Japan Society of Logopedics and Phoniatrics.
        Previous studies reported only five speech symptoms as characteristics of acquired stuttering, i. e., “sound and syllable repetition,” “prolongation,” “block,” “pause” and “break.” In addition to these five symptoms, our cases showed another 11-12 symptoms, such as “intertwined symptom,” “connected symptom,” “complex sympotom” and “string symptom.” Our cases also demonstrated some nonspeech motor behavior which differed from the type of motor behavior that usually accompanies developmental stuttering.
        According to the previous reports, adaptation effect was not observed in cases of acquired stuttering, but our case 1 showed this effect. In case 1, the number of symptoms decreased and the rate of simplification of symptoms increased during the recovery process.
    Download PDF (1610K)
  • Rika Nakajima, Tomoko Horai, Akiko Matui, Hikaru Nakamura, Toshihiko H ...
    1993 Volume 13 Issue 4 Pages 323-329
    Published: 1993
    Released on J-STAGE: June 14, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
        The study aimed to examine similarities among three auditory comprehension tests. The three tests are 1) Standard Language Test of Aphasia (Subtes of auditory comprehension) (S-test), 2) Token Test (T-test) and 3) Syntax Test of Aphasia(Subtes of auditory comprehension) (A-test). 48 right-handed, aphasics were tested, Cluster analysis was performed. Analysis of the results obtained two clearly defined clusters and one non-clustered item. The first cluster was composed of word comprehension items, namely, the word comprehension items of S-test, part A of T-test and level 1 of A-test. The second cluster was composed of T-test items except part A. The motcluster item consisted of the sentence comprehension items of the S-test, the article manupilation items of the S-test, and all items of the S-test except level 1. The results suggest that each test has its own character ; further careful analysis is required before one test can be used as a substitute for the others.
    Download PDF (1131K)
  • Hirofumi Oyama, Kei Hojo, Masahito Saito, Junko Miura, Seiko Tamada, H ...
    1993 Volume 13 Issue 4 Pages 330-337
    Published: 1993
    Released on J-STAGE: June 14, 2006
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
        We reported on a 74 -year-old right-handed man who displayed visual associative agnosia due to cerebral infarction. His agnosia was accompanied by left upper quadranopia, prosopagnosia, pure alexia, color naming difficulty, topographical disorientation and recent memory deficit, without Balint's syndrome. Language and general intelligence were well preserved. His visual agnosia had a salient feature in that the presentation of an object at an unusual angle, without kinesthetic clues, caused an increase of visual recognition difficulty compared to an object shown to him in a natural position. This phenomenon has been described as visual static agnosia. MRI revealed bilateral temporo-occipital lesions which included bilateral inferior longitudinal fasciculi and defined lesions in bilateral parieto-occipital junctions.
        It has been recognized that visual information processing in the human brain may be carried out by two parallel, distinct neural pathways: the dorsal, occipito-parietal projections of the visual system for the analysis of spatial information and the ventral, occipito-temporal projections for the recognition of visual patterns. Given this theory, the subject's clinical neuropsychological and neuroradiological findings suggest that the damage to bilateral occipito-temporal projections may cause visual associative agnosia, and that compensation by the function of the occipitoparietal projections following the geniculostriate visual system might participate in the genesis of his visual static agnosia.
    Download PDF (1431K)
feedback
Top