[Amnesiac aphasia. Study of 25 cases]

Twenty-five patients with "amnesic aphasia" were studied. The language difficulty is not related either to intellectual deficit, generalised memory disturbance or visual impairment but is a specific verbal memory defect. Amnesic aphasia also involves lack of perception of linguistic units which is caused by impairment of comprehension and erasure of the acoustico-mnesic traces of words. The responsible lesions are in the left temporal region. The authors maintain that, from the physio-pathological point of view, these lesions do not destroy the cortex and sub-cortex, as in focal necrosis, but cause cortical dysfunction selectively affecting the mnesic traces of words.