Lucchelli Federica, Papagno Costanza
Department of Neurology, A.O. Sant' Anna, Como, Italy.
Neurocase. 2005 Jun;11(3):234-41. doi: 10.1080/13554790590944889.
It is usually assumed that writing is normal in patients with anarthria, but a careful examination of the literature shows that they produce deletions, transpositions and insertions. Indeed, a matter of debate concerns the distinction between primary progressive aphasia (PPA) and slowly progressive anarthria (SPA). If writing deficits were purely linguistic errors, then there would be no reason to consider slowly progressive anarthria as distinct from non-fluent PPA. We report the case of a patient with SPA in whom writing abilities were specifically assessed. No lexical-semantic deficits were detected, but errors were deletions, substitutions or transpositions, with no frequency, length or lexicality effect; moreover, controls produced the same kind of errors during articulatory suppression. It is suggested that subvocal rehearsal plays a role in writing, allowing the conversion/assembly of the phonological string in a graphemic representation. Therefore, writing deficits do not appear to have a linguistic basis and SPA seems distinguishable from nonfluent forms of aphasia.
通常认为，构音障碍患者的书写是正常的，但仔细查阅文献会发现，他们会出现缺失、换位和插入的情况。事实上，一个有争议的问题是原发性进行性失语症（PPA）和缓慢进行性构音障碍（SPA）之间的区别。如果书写缺陷纯粹是语言错误，那么就没有理由认为缓慢进行性构音障碍与非流利性PPA不同。我们报告了一例对其书写能力进行了专门评估的SPA患者。未检测到词汇语义缺陷，但错误表现为缺失、替换或换位，不存在频率、长度或词汇性效应；此外，对照组在发音抑制期间也出现了同样类型的错误。有人提出，默读复述在书写中起作用，使语音串能够转换/组装成字形表征。因此，书写缺陷似乎没有语言基础，而且SPA似乎可与非流利性失语症形式区分开来。
