Crutch Sebastian J, Ridha Basil H, Warrington Elizabeth K
Dementia Research Centre, Department of Neurodegeneration, Institute of Neurology, University College, London, UK.
Neurocase. 2006 Jun;12(3):151-63. doi: 10.1080/13554790600598832.
We report the case of a bilingual patient (IRQ) who acquired a semantic refractory access dysphasia following a middle cerebral artery stroke. In a series of spoken word-written word matching tasks, the degree of semantic similarity between target and distractor items was found to affect the accuracy of IRQ's identification of concrete but not abstract words. By contrast, the degree of semantic association between target and distractor items was found to affect response accuracy when identifying abstract but not concrete words. These results provide further corroboration for the notion that abstract concepts are supported by an associative representational network whereas concrete concepts are supported by a categorical representational framework. We also demonstrate an equivalent refractory deficit of comprehension in both English and Arabic. In addition, we provide the first documented evidence of a category-specific refractory deficit of knowledge for abstract words.
我们报告了一例双语患者（IRQ）的病例，该患者在大脑中动脉中风后出现了语义难治性通达性失语。在一系列口语单词与书面单词匹配任务中，发现目标词与干扰项之间的语义相似程度会影响IRQ对具体单词而非抽象单词的识别准确性。相比之下，发现目标词与干扰项之间的语义关联程度在识别抽象单词而非具体单词时会影响反应准确性。这些结果进一步证实了这样一种观点，即抽象概念由联想表征网络支持，而具体概念由分类表征框架支持。我们还证明了该患者在英语和阿拉伯语中都存在同等程度的难治性理解缺陷。此外，我们首次提供了关于抽象单词存在类别特异性难治性知识缺陷的文献证据。
