Temporal speech characteristics associated with anterior left hemisphere cortical and subcortical lesions: a...

There is disagreement in the literature regarding the characteristics of cortical and subcortical forms of aphasia. M. L. Albert, H. Goodglass, N. A. Helm, A. B. Rubens, and M. P. Alexander (Clinical Aspects of Dysphasia, Vienna/New York: Springer-Verlag, 1980) state that the two are indistinguishable. The opposing view has been presented by M. A. Naeser, M. P. Alexander, N. Helm-Estabrook, H. L. Levine, S. A. Laughlin, and N. Geschwind (Archives of Neurology, 39, 1982) and A. R. Damasio, H. Damasio, M. Rizzo, N. Varney, and F. Gersh (Archives of Neurology, 39, 15-20, 1982), who suggest that subcortical aphasias are not adequately described by the classic, cortical aphasia descriptions. In this study the temporal speech characteristics of a neurologically normal individual, an aphasic patient with anterior cortical and subcortical lesion locus, and a second aphasic patient, whose lesion was limited to anterior subcortical structures, were studied utilizing acoustic analysis of isolated word and phrase productions. The results of this investigation showed individually unique temporal patterns in the speech of each of the subjects studied. While the results must be interpreted conservatively due to the small number of cases described, they do provide tentative support for the Naeser et al. (1982) and Damasio et al. (1982) position. Furthermore, the results demonstrate the potential value of combining sensitive radiographic and acoustic measures in future studies that seek to compare cortical and subcortical forms of aphasia.