ORGANIZATION OF LANGUAGE AND BRAIN
ORGANIZATION OF LANGUAGE AND BRAIN
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DOI:
10.1126/science.170.3961.940
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发表时间:
1970-01-01
期刊:
影响因子:
56.9
通讯作者:
GESCHWIN.N
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
GESCHWIN.N
Norman Geschwind abnormal, since the patient clearly fails to produce correct English sentences. Characteristically the small grammatical words and endings are omitted. This failure persists despite urging by the examiner, and even when'the patient attempts to repeat the correct sentence as produced by the examiner. These patients may show a surprising capacity to find single words. Thus, asked about the weather, the patient might say," Overcast." Urged to produce a sentence he may say," Weather... overcast." These patients invariably show a comparable disorder in their written output, but they may comprehend spoken and written language normally. In striking contrast to these performances, the patient may retain his musical capacities. It is a common but most dramatic finding to observe a patient who produces single substantive words with great effort and poor articulation and yet sings a melody correctly and even elegantly. Because Broca's area lies so close to the motor cortex (Fig. 2), this latter region is often damaged simultaneously, so that these patients frequently suffer from paralysis of the right side of the body. The Wernicke's aphasic contrasts sharply with the Broca's type. The patient usually has no paralysis of the opposite side, a fact which reflects the difference in the anatomical localization of his lesion. The speech output can be rapid and effortless, and in many cases the rate of production of words exceeds the normal. The output has the rhythm and melody of normal speech, but it is remarkably empty and conveys little or no information. The· patient uses many filler words, and the speech is filled with circumlocutions. There may be many errors in word usage, which are called paraphasias. These may take the form of the wellarticulated replacement of single sounds (so-called literal or phonemic paraphasias), such as" spoot" for" spoon," or the replacement of one word for another (verbal paraphasias), such as" fork" for" spoon." A typical production might be," I was over in the other one, and then after they had been in the department, 1 was in this one." The grammatical skeleton appears to be preserved, but there is a remarkable lack of words with specific denotation. The Wernicke's aphasic may, in writing, produce well-formed letters, but the output exhibits the same linguistic defects' which are observed in the patient's speech. He shows a profound failure to understand both spoken