Atypical conduction aphasia and the right hemisphere: Cross-hemispheric plasticity of phonology in a developmentally dyslexic and dysgraphic patient with early left frontal damage.
We report the rare case of a patient, JNR, with history of mixed handedness, developmental dyslexia, dysgraphia, and attentional deficits associated with a Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome and a small subcortical frontal lesion involving the left arcuate fasciculus. In adulthood, he suffered a large right perisylvian stroke and developed atypical conduction aphasia with deficits in input and output phonological processing and poor auditory-verbal short-term memory. Lexical-semantic processing for single words was intact, but he was unable to access meaning in sentence comprehension and repetition. Reading and writing deficits worsened after the stroke and he presented a combination of developmental and acquired dysgraphia and dyslexia with mixed lexical and phonological processing deficits. This case suggest that a small lesion sustained prenatally or early in life could induce a selective rightward shift of phonology sparing the standard left hemisphere lateralisation of lexical-semantic functions.
Berthier
Marcelo L
ML
Centro de Investigaciones Médico-Sanitarias (CIMES), C/Marques de Beccaria 3, Málaga, Spain. mbt@uma.es
Dávila
Guadalupe
G
García-Casares
Natalia
N
Green
Cristina
C
Juárez
Rocío
R
Ruiz-Cruces
Rafael
R
Pablo Lara
J
J
Barbancho
M A
MA
D000328:Adult; D000381:Agraphia / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D018886:Aphasia, Conduction / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000473:pathology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D007715:Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome / Q000503:physiopathology; D008875:Middle Aged; D009473:Neuronal Plasticity / Q000502:physiology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010700:Phonetics; D012660:Semantics; D020521:Stroke / Q000150:complications