Transcortical sensory aphasia with preserved spontaneous speech and naming - A case study

Abstract

The basic features of transcortical sensory aphasia are disturbance of auditory understanding of speech, anomia and preserved ability of repeating language stimuli. Spontaneous speech of patients with this aphasia is fluent, paraphasic and semantically scarce. In this paper we report a case of a 57-year-old patient, right-handed with a lesion of the temporo-parietal part of the left hemisphere whose aphasia differed from classical form of transcortical sensory aphasia in preserved naming and semantically coherent speech. It has been assumed that this type of aphasia results from dissociation between phonologic and semantic processing of linguistic symbols, where the phonemic-phonologic processes are preserved, while the approach from the receptive lexicon to semantic system is affected, i.e., areas responsible for semantic processing to linguistic information.