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Behavioural Neurology 2019Acalculia is an acquired disorder in calculation abilities, usually associated with left posterior parietal damage. Two types of acalculic disorders are usually... (Review)
Review
Acalculia is an acquired disorder in calculation abilities, usually associated with left posterior parietal damage. Two types of acalculic disorders are usually distinguished: (1) primary acalculia or anarithmetia, where the patient presents a loss of numerical concepts (difficulties are observed both in oral and written calculations), and (2) secondary acalculia due to a different disturbance in cognition and affecting mathematical abilities. Secondary acalculias are associated with aphasia, alexia, agraphia, executive function disorders, or visuospatial difficulties. This paper is a proposal for clinical intervention to rehabilitation of acquired primary and secondary acalculias.
Topics: Cognition; Cognition Disorders; Dyscalculia; Humans; Mathematics; Neuropsychological Tests
PubMed: 31093301
DOI: 10.1155/2019/3151092 -
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2022Language performance requires support from central cognitive/linguistic abilities as well as the more peripheral sensorimotor skills to plan and implement spoken and...
Language performance requires support from central cognitive/linguistic abilities as well as the more peripheral sensorimotor skills to plan and implement spoken and written communication. Both output modalities are vulnerable to impairment following damage to the language-dominant hemisphere, but much of the research to date has focused exclusively on spoken language. In this study we aimed to examine an integrated model of language processing that includes the common cognitive processes that support spoken and written language, as well as modality-specific skills. To do so, we evaluated spoken and written language performance from 87 individuals with acquired language impairment resulting from damage to left perisylvian cortical regions that collectively constitute the dorsal language pathway. Comprehensive behavioral assessment served to characterize the status of central and peripheral components of language processing in relation to neurotypical controls ( = 38). Performance data entered into principal components analyses (with or without control scores) consistently yielded a strong five-factor solution. In line with a primary systems framework, three central cognitive factors emerged: semantics, phonology, and orthography that were distinguished from peripheral processes supporting speech production and allographic skill for handwriting. The central phonology construct reflected performance on phonological awareness and manipulation tasks and showed the greatest deficit of all the derived factors. Importantly, this phonological construct was orthogonal to the speech production factor that reflected repetition of words/non-words. When entered into regression analyses, semantics and phonological skill were common predictors of language performance across spoken and written modalities. The speech production factor was also a strong, distinct predictor of spoken naming and oral reading, in contrast to allographic skills which only predicted written output. As expected, visual orthographic processing contributed more to written than spoken language tasks and reading/spelling performance was strongly reliant on phonological and semantic abilities. Despite the heterogeneity of this cohort regarding aphasia type and severity, the marked impairment of phonological skill was a unifying feature. These findings prompt greater attention to clinical assessment and potential treatment of underlying phonological skill in individuals with left perisylvian damage.
PubMed: 36419644
DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.1025468 -
Neuropsychological Rehabilitation 2013Acquired reading problems caused by brain injury (alexia) are common, either as a part of an aphasic syndrome, or as an isolated symptom. In pure alexia, reading is... (Review)
Review
Acquired reading problems caused by brain injury (alexia) are common, either as a part of an aphasic syndrome, or as an isolated symptom. In pure alexia, reading is impaired while other language functions, including writing, are spared. Being in many ways a simple syndrome, one would think that pure alexia was an easy target for rehabilitation efforts. We review the literature on rehabilitation of pure alexia from 1990 to the present, and find that patients differ widely on several dimensions, such as alexia severity and associated deficits. Many patients reported to have pure alexia in the reviewed studies, have associated deficits such as agraphia or aphasia and thus do not strictly conform to the diagnosis. Few studies report clear and generalisable effects of training, none report control data, and in many cases the reported findings are not supported by statistics. We can, however, tentatively conclude that Multiple Oral Re-reading techniques may have some effect in mild pure alexia where diminished reading speed is the main problem, while Tacile-Kinesthetic training may improve letter identification in more severe cases of alexia. There is, however, still a great need for well-designed and controlled studies of rehabilitation of pure alexia.
Topics: Alexia, Pure; Humans
PubMed: 23808895
DOI: 10.1080/09602011.2013.809661 -
Neurology May 2022Most primary progressive aphasia (PPA) literature is based on English language users. Linguistic features that vary from English, such as logographic writing systems,...
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
Most primary progressive aphasia (PPA) literature is based on English language users. Linguistic features that vary from English, such as logographic writing systems, are underinvestigated. The current study characterized the dysgraphia phenotypes of patients with PPA who write in Chinese and investigated their diagnostic utility in classifying PPA variants.
METHODS
This study recruited 40 participants with PPA and 20 cognitively normal participants from San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. We measured dictation accuracy using the Chinese Language Assessment for PPA (CLAP) 60-character orthographic dictation test and examined the occurrence of various writing errors across the study groups. We also performed voxel-based morphometry analysis to identify the gray matter regions correlated with dictation accuracy and prevalence of writing errors.
RESULTS
All PPA groups produced significantly less accurate writing responses than the control group and no significant differences in dictation accuracy were noted among the PPA variants. With a cut score of 36 out of 60 in the CLAP orthographic dictation task, the test achieved sensitivity and specificity of 90% and 95% in identifying Chinese participants with PPA vs controls. In addition to a character frequency effect, dictation accuracy was affected by homophone density and the number of strokes in semantic variant PPA and logopenic variant PPA groups. Dictation accuracy was correlated with volumetric changes over left ventral temporal cortices, regions known to be critical for orthographic long-term memory. Individuals with semantic variant PPA frequently presented with phonologically plausible errors at lexical level, patients with logopenic variant PPA showed higher preponderance towards visual and stroke errors, and patients with nonfluent/agrammatic variant PPA commonly exhibited compound word and radical errors. The prevalence of phonologically plausible, visual, and compound word errors was negatively correlated with cortical volume over the bilateral temporal regions, left temporo-occipital area, and bilateral orbitofrontal gyri, respectively.
DISCUSSION
The findings demonstrate the potential role of the orthographic dictation task as a screening tool and PPA classification indicator in Chinese language users. Each PPA variant had specific Chinese dysgraphia phenotypes that vary from those previously reported in English-speaking patients with PPA, highlighting the importance of language diversity in PPA.
Topics: Agraphia; Aphasia, Primary Progressive; China; Humans; Language; Phenotype; Primary Progressive Nonfluent Aphasia
PubMed: 35410909
DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000200350 -
Behavioural Neurology 2005Understanding how the mappings between orthography and phonology in alphabetic languages are learned, represented and processed has been enhanced by the cognitive... (Review)
Review
Understanding how the mappings between orthography and phonology in alphabetic languages are learned, represented and processed has been enhanced by the cognitive neuropsychological investigation of patients with acquired reading and writing disorders. During the past decade, this methodology has been extended to understanding reading and writing in Chinese leading to new insights about language processing, dyslexia and dysgraphia. The aim of this paper is to review reports of patients who have acquired dyslexia and acquired dysgraphia in Chinese and describe the functional architecture of the reading and writing system. Our conclusion is that the unique features of Chinese script will determine the symptoms of acquired dyslexia and dysgraphia in Chinese.
Topics: Agraphia; Asian People; Dyslexia, Acquired; Humans; Language
PubMed: 16410631
DOI: 10.1155/2005/323205 -
The Tohoku Journal of Experimental... Aug 1990Of the higher disorders associated with posterior cerebral lesions two have received considerable attention in the past decade. These are prosopagnosia, the so-called... (Review)
Review
Of the higher disorders associated with posterior cerebral lesions two have received considerable attention in the past decade. These are prosopagnosia, the so-called agnosia for faces, and alexia without agraphia. Major aspects of these disorders are reviewed briefly.
Topics: Agnosia; Animals; Association; Brain Damage, Chronic; Cerebral Arteries; Corpus Callosum; Discrimination, Psychological; Dyslexia, Acquired; Face; Functional Laterality; Humans; Migraine Disorders; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Temporal Lobe; Visual Cortex
PubMed: 2082494
DOI: 10.1620/tjem.161.supplement_121 -
Developmental Medicine and Child... Oct 2004
Topics: Agraphia; Child; Handwriting; Humans
PubMed: 15473167
DOI: 10.1017/s0012162204001094 -
Neurology Jul 2015
Topics: Agraphia; Female; Handwriting; Humans; Middle Aged; Recovery of Function
PubMed: 26195237
DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000001754 -
Scientific Reports Dec 2020Dysgraphia, a disorder affecting the written expression of symbols and words, negatively impacts the academic results of pupils as well as their overall well-being. The...
Dysgraphia, a disorder affecting the written expression of symbols and words, negatively impacts the academic results of pupils as well as their overall well-being. The use of automated procedures can make dysgraphia testing available to larger populations, thereby facilitating early intervention for those who need it. In this paper, we employed a machine learning approach to identify handwriting deteriorated by dysgraphia. To achieve this goal, we collected a new handwriting dataset consisting of several handwriting tasks and extracted a broad range of features to capture different aspects of handwriting. These were fed to a machine learning algorithm to predict whether handwriting is affected by dysgraphia. We compared several machine learning algorithms and discovered that the best results were achieved by the adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) algorithm. The results show that machine learning can be used to detect dysgraphia with almost 80% accuracy, even when dealing with a heterogeneous set of subjects differing in age, sex and handedness.
Topics: Adolescent; Agraphia; Algorithms; Case-Control Studies; Child; Data Accuracy; Female; Handwriting; Humans; Machine Learning; Male
PubMed: 33299092
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-78611-9