Dissociation of functions in a case of transcortical sensory aphasia

Abstract

A patient is described who presents fluent speech, auditory comprehension deficit, and relatively intact sentence repetition. Performance on word-picture matching, attribute judgements, picture naming, naming from definition, and describing objects from their names indicates a selective deficit to the semantic system. Sentence repetition performance, which was affected by syntactic variables and tended to preserve grammatical structure, was interpreted as an indication of relatively intact syntactic and phonological processing abilities. The implications of this dissociation of semantics from syntax and phonology is discussed, and the nature of the semantic system that could give rise to these symptoms is considered.