Transcortical sensory aphasia with relatively spared spontaneous speech and naming

Patients with transcortical sensory aphasia have relatively preserved repetition ability but have poor comprehension and naming ability. Their spontaneous speech contains paraphasic errors and lacks content. We describe a patient with a left parietal lesion who had poor comprehension but who was able to repeat. However, unlike previously reported cases of transcortical aphasia, the patient had relatively normal naming and spontaneous speech. We believe that this distinct and previously unreported form of transcortical aphasia is induced by a one-way dissociation between phonemic and semantic processors.