Bilateral tactile aphasia: a tacto-verbal dysfunction

Bilateral tactile aphasia was exhibited by a patient who was operated upon for a left parieto-occipital haematoma. Neuropsychological investigation established the following points: (1) the patient, in whom no expressive or receptive dysphasia could be found, misnamed objects when they were presented to him tactually, whereas he almost always gave the correct name when they were presented visually or auditorily; (2) the naming disturbance was identical when the object was presented to the left hand or to the right hand; (3) not only did the patient have no sensory deficit, but he could give unquestionable proof of correct tactile identification by using the objects presented to him tactually; (4) the defect appeared in the verbo-tactile as well as in the tacto-verbal direction; (5) it was not restricted to the name of the object since the patient was unable to describe, without making dysphasic errors, the morphology or usage of objects presented to him tactually; (6) the tacto-verbal dysfunction did not result from a tacto-visual impairment. Computerized tomography scans showed that: (1) there was no evidence suggesting a lesion of the right hemisphere, nor of the corpus callosum; (2) the left lesion involved the angular gyrus, the posterior part of the second temporal convolution, the inferior longitudinal fasciculus, the geniculostriate fibres and some fibres of the tapetum.