Patterns of discourse production among neurological patients with fluent language disorders.
Publication/Presentation Date
1-1-1991
Abstract
Dissociations between impairments in microlinguistic and macrolinguistic abilities were examined in brain-damaged patients to assess whether these abilities are psychologically and neurologically distinct. The discourse productions of three groups of patients with equally severe fluent language disorders, but varying neuropathology and varying profiles of associated nonlinguistic cognitive impairments, were analyzed. Patients with fluent aphasia secondary to a single left-hemisphere CVA showed the greatest impairment on syntactic and lexical error measures taken to reflect microlinguistic abilities, but normal performance on measures of macrolinguistic organization (i.e., thematic coherence). Patients with probable Alzheimer's Disease were impaired on thematic coherence measures, but not on measures reflecting microlinguistic syntactic and phonological processes. Closed head injury patients whose primary clinical symptom was a fluent language disorder were impaired on both microlinguistic and macrolinguistic measures, which appears to parallel their deficits both in language-specific and in nonspecific, higher-order, diffusely organized cognitive processes.
Volume
40
Issue
1
First Page
67
Last Page
88
ISSN
0093-934X
Published In/Presented At
Glosser, G., & Deser, T. (1991). Patterns of discourse production among neurological patients with fluent language disorders. Brain and language, 40(1), 67–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/0093-934x(91)90117-j
Disciplines
Medicine and Health Sciences | Psychiatry
PubMedID
2009448
Department(s)
Department of Psychiatry
Document Type
Article