Anderson S W, Damasio H, Damasio A R, Klima E, Bellugi U, Brandt J P
Department of Neurology, University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City.
Neuropsychologia. 1992 Apr;30(4):329-40. doi: 10.1016/0028-3932(92)90106-v.
Three severely aphasic hearing patients with no prior knowledge of sign language were able to acquire competency in aspects of American Sign Language (ASL) lexicon and finger spelling, in contrast to a near complete inability to speak the English counterparts of these visuo-gestural signs. Two patients with damage in left postero-lateral temporal and inferior parietal cortices mastered production and comprehension of single signs and short meaningful sign sequences, but the one patient with damage to virtually all left temporal cortices was less accurate in single sign processing and was unable to produce sequences of signs at all. These findings suggest that conceptual knowledge is represented independently of the auditory-vocal records for the corresponding lexical entries, and that left anterior temporal cortices outside of traditional "language areas" are part of the neural network which supports the linkage between conceptual knowledge and linguistic signs, especially as they are used in the sequenced activations required for production or comprehension of meaningful sentences.
三名严重失语的听力患者此前对手语一无所知，但他们能够掌握美国手语（ASL）词汇和手指拼写的相关能力，相比之下，他们几乎完全无法说出这些视觉手势符号对应的英语词汇。两名左后外侧颞叶和顶下皮质受损的患者掌握了单个手语及简短有意义的手语序列的表达和理解，但一名几乎整个左侧颞叶皮质都受损的患者在单个手语处理方面准确性较低，并且根本无法生成手语序列。这些发现表明，概念知识的表征独立于相应词汇条目的听觉 - 语音记录，并且传统“语言区域”之外的左前颞叶皮质是神经网络的一部分，该神经网络支持概念知识与语言符号之间的联系，特别是在生成或理解有意义的句子所需的序列激活中使用这些符号时。
