Language impairment and colour categories

Goldstein (1948) reported multiple cases of failure to categorise colours in patients that he termed amnesic or anomic aphasics. these patients have a particular difficulty in producing perceptual categories in the absence of other aphasic impairments. we hold that neuropsychological evidence supports the view that the task of colour categorisation is logically impossible without labels

Osservazioni cliniche e anatomiche nella storia della neuropsicologia del linguaggio: gli studi pre-Broca

Riassunto: I manuali di neurologia e neuropsicologia sono soliti datare l’esordio della storia dell'afasia con la comunicazione di Paul Broca sulla sede del linguaggio articolato nei lobi frontali (1861). Di fatto, Benton e Joynt (1960) hanno raccolto numerose osservazioni di pazienti afasici dalla tradizione medica greca, latina, medioevale, rinascimentale e dalla letteratura illuministica del XVIII secolo. In nessuno dei casi riportati, tuttavia, pare siano stati identificati gli elementi cruciali di un deficit di linguaggio di natura afasica, e cioè da un lato la distinzione tra deficit di linguaggio, deficit concettuali e deficit della realizzazione articolatoria, dall'altro, la relazione con una lesione dell’emisfero cerebrale sinistro. Nella prima parte di questo articolo si discutono le opere di due medici del XVI e XVII secolo, Johannes Schenck e Johannes Jacob Wepfer, i cui studi sono poco sconosciuti. Johannes Schenck (1530-1598) realizzò una raccolta di osservazioni cliniche dall’Antichità ai suoi contemporanei. Nel primo volume (Observationes medicae de capite humano, 1584) egli discusse l’intera patologia della testa e della faccia. Almeno 16 di queste osservazioni fanno riferimento a pazienti con deficit di linguaggio di tipo afasico. Johannes Jakob Wepfer (1620-1695) scrisse numerosi testi di neuroanatomia, sulla vascolarizzazione del cervello e sull’apoplessia. Raccolse una collezione di casi neurologici (Observationes medico-practicae de affectibus capitis internis & externis) che fu pubblicata postuma. In almeno 15 delle 222 osservazioni è descritta la presenza di deficit afasici. Come atteso, in quasi ogni caso questi sono conseguenti a lesioni nell’emisfero di sinistra. Wepfer non pare tuttavia riconoscere tale asimmetria. Nella seconda parte di questo articolo si riporteranno i dati dello straordinario studio di Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1825) che delineò i principi fondamentali della correlazione anatomo-funzionale in neuropsicologia e applicò tali principi allo scopo di confermare empiricamente il ruolo dei lobi frontali nell’ideazione e programmazione del linguaggio orale.Parole chiave: Storia dell’afasiologia; Storia della neuropsicologia; Correlazione anatomo-funzionale; Correlazione mente-cervello; Storia del pensiero scientifico. Clinical and Anatomical Observations in the History of Neurolinguistics: Studies Predating Paul BrocaAbstract:Classical neurological and neuropsychological handbooks usually cite Paul Broca’s communication on the frontal lobes as the seat of articulated speech (1861) as the starting point in the history of the study of apha-sia as. In their seminal study, Benton and Joynt (1960) have collected numerous observations of aphasic patients from the Greek, Latin Medieval and Renaissance medical tradition and from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment literature. In none of the reported cases, however, were the crucial elements of aphasia, that is, is, on the one hand the distinction between language deficits, conceptual damage and speech disorders and, on the other hand, the association with lesions of the left brain hemisphere – clearly identified. The first part of this article describes the work of Johannes Schenck and Johannes Jakob Wepfer, two medical scientists in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, whose studies are almost entirely unknown. Johannes Schenck (1530-1598) completed a collection of clinical observations including both reports from antiquity and from his contemporaries. In his first volume (Observationes medicae de capite humano, Basel, 1584) he considers the major diseases of the head and face. At least 16 of these observations refer to patients with aphasia. Johannes Jakob Wepfer (1620-1695) published several texts on neuroanatomy, brain vascularization and apoplexy. He gathered a collection of neurological cases (Observationes medico-practicae de affectibus capitis internis & externis), which was published posthumously. At least 15 of the 222 observations included report the presence of aphasia. As expected, in almost all cases, aphasia was due to lesions in the left hemisphere. Wepfer, however, does not seem to have noted this asymmetry. In the second part of this article, the extraordinary study of Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1825) will be reported: Bouillaud outlined the basic principles of anatomo-functional correlations in neuropychology and applied these principles in order to confirm empirically the role of the frontal lobes in language and speech production.Keywords: Early History of Aphasiology; Early History of Neuropsychology; Anatomo-Functional Correlation of Language; Mind-Brain Relationship; History of Scientific Thought

Effects of Reading Proficiency and of Base and Whole-Word Frequency on Reading Noun- and Verb-Derived Words: An Eye-Tracking Study in Italian Primary School Children

The aim of this study is to assess the role of readers’ proficiency and of the base-word distributional properties on eye-movement behavior. Sixty-two typically developing children, attending 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, were asked to read derived words in a sentence context. Target words were nouns derived from noun bases (e.g., umorista, ‘humorist’), which in Italian are shared by few derived words, and nouns derived from verb bases (e.g., punizione, ‘punishment’), which are shared by about 50 different inflected forms and several derived words. Data shows that base and word frequency affected first-fixation duration for nouns derived from noun bases, but in an opposite way: base frequency had a facilitative effect on first fixation, whereas word frequency exerted an inhibitory effect. These results were interpreted as a competition between early accessed base words (e.g., camino, chimney) and target words (e.g., caminetto, fireplace). For nouns derived from verb bases, an inhibitory base frequency effect but no word frequency effect was observed. These results suggest that syntactic context, calling for a noun in the target position, lead to an inhibitory effect when a verb base was detected, and made it difficult for readers to access the corresponding base+suffix combination (whole word) in the very early processing phases. Gaze duration was mainly affected by word frequency and length: for nouns derived from noun bases, this interaction was modulated by proficiency, as length effect was stronger for less proficient readers, while they were processing low-frequency words. For nouns derived from verb bases, though, all children, irrespective of their reading ability, showed sensitivity to the interaction within frequency of base+suffix combination (word frequency) and target length. Results of this study are consistent with those of other Italian studies that contrasted noun and verb processing, and confirm that distributional properties of morphemic constituents have a significant impact on the strategies used for processing morphologically complex words

Evaluating Semantic Knowledge Through a Semantic Association Task in Individuals With Dementia

Conceptual knowledge is supported by multiple semantic systems that are specialized for the analysis of different properties associated with object concepts. Various types of semantic association between concrete concepts—categorical (CA), encyclopedic (EA), functional (FA), and visual-encyclopedic (VEA) associations—were tested through a new picture-to-picture matching task (semantic association task, SAT). Forty individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD), 13 with behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bv-FTD), 6 with primary progressive aphasia (PPA), and 37 healthy participants were tested with the SAT. Within-group comparisons highlighted a global impairment of all types of semantic association in bv-FTD individuals but a disproportionate impairment of EA and FA, with relative sparing of CA and VEA, in AD individuals. Single-case analyses detected dissociations in all dementia groups. Conceptual knowledge can be selectively impaired in various types of neurodegenerative disease on the basis of the specific cognitive process that is disrupted

A Metabolic Imaging Study of Lexical and Phonological Naming Errors in Alzheimer Disease

Patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) produce a variety of errors on confrontation naming that indicate multiple loci of impairment along the naming process in this disease. We correlated brain hypometabolism, measured with 18fluoro-deoxy-glucose positron emission tomography, with semantic and formal errors, as well as nonwords deriving from phonological errors produced in a picture-naming test by 63 patients with AD. Findings suggest that neurodegeneration leads to: (1) phonemic errors, by interfering with phonological short-term memory, or with control over retrieval of phonological or prearticulatory representations, within the left supramarginal gyrus; (2) semantic errors, by disrupting general semantic or visual-semantic representations at the level of the left posterior middle and inferior occipitotemporal cortex, respectively; (3) formal errors, by damaging the lexical-phonological output interface in the left mid-anterior segment of middle and superior temporal gyri. This topography of semantic-lexical-phonological steps of naming is in substantial agreement with dual-stream neurocognitive models of word generation

L’effetto di superiorità della parola e della pseudoparola: Una rassegna della letteratura e prospettive future [Word and pseudoword superiority effects: A literature review and future perspectives]

Il paradigma di Reicher-Wheeler (Reicher, 1969; Wheeler, 1970) consente di evidenziare l’Effetto di Superiorità della Parola (Word Superiority Effect, WSE), vale a dire che è più facile riconoscere una lettera che compare all’interno di una parola piuttosto che all’interno di una non parola o come lettera singola. Accanto al WSE è stato descritto anche un Effetto di Superiorità della Pseudoparola (Pseudoword Superiority Effect, PSE), cioè, una superiorità delle pseudoparole sulle non parole illegali. Il WSE ha permesso di dimostrare l'attivazione automatica delle entrate ortografico-lessicali ed ha costituito un effetto di riferimento per la verifica dei principali modelli cognitivi di lettura (es. Coltheart et al., 1980; 2001) e di riconoscimento di parole singole (es. Grainger & Ziegler, 2011). L’analisi dei processi implicati nel PSE ha permesso di formulare ipotesi più dettagliate in merito ai processi di decodifica sublessicale. In questa revisione, passiamo in rassegna e commentiamo i principali studi su questi fenomeni. Inoltre, consideriamo l'utilizzo del paradigma di Reicher-Wheeler in altri campi della psicolinguistica e in neuropsicologia

Lemma Theory and Aphasiology.

3nonenoneSEMENZA C.; LUZZATTI C .; MONDINI S.Semenza, Carlo; Luzzatti, C. .; Mondini, S

Linguistic theory and morphosyntactic impairments in German and Italian aphasics

At the turn of the century, the study of agrammatism started in German aphasiology with the introduction of syntax as an object of research in linguistics and the psychology of language. The disorder descriptively known as agrammatism was originally thought to arise from multiple origins, at the level of syntactic word order, of function word insertion, of grammaticalization by means of morphology, or as an impairment of processing. In modern aphasiology, there have been several attempts to reduce agrammatism to a single cause, such as the loss of specific syntactic operations or a deficit in morpholexical access. This article summarizes the results of morpholexical and morphosyntactic experiments with two German and two Italian agrammatic patients. The cross-language data reveal far more inflectional abilities than is usually assumed for agrammatism. Furthermore, they strongly support characterizations of the disorder as a syntactic rather than a morpholexical deficit

Noun-verb dissociation in aphasia: type/token differences in the analysis of spontaneous speech

4nonenoneLUZZATTI C; INGIGNOLI C; CREPALDI D; SEMENZA C.Luzzatti, C; Ingignoli, C; Crepaldi, D; Semenza, Carl