Lynn J Speedie | Search PubMed

PubMed2005

Characteristics of auditory agnosia in a child with severe traumatic brain injury: a case report.

We present a case that is unusual in many respects from other documented incidences of auditory agnosia, including the mechanism of injury, age of the individual, and location of neurological insult. The clinical presentation is one of disturbance in the perception of spoken language, music, pitch, emotional prosody, and temporal auditory processing in the absence of significant deficits in the comprehension of written language, expressive language production, or peripheral auditory function. Furthermore, the patient demonstrates relatively preserved function in other aspects of audition such as sound localization, voice recognition, and perception of animal noises and environmental sounds. This case study demonstrates that auditory agnosia is possible following traumatic brain injury in a child, and illustrates the necessity of assessment with a wide variety of auditory stimuli to fully characterize auditory agnosia in a single individual.

Agnosia↗

PubMed2002

Reading direction and spatial neglect.

Many American and European investigators have reported that hemispatial neglect is more frequent and more severe after right than left hemisphere lesions. This hemispheric asymmetry may be due to biological asymmetries, learned behavior, or both. Readers of European languages, unlike readers of Semitic languages, scan from left to right. Learned rightward scanning may increase the unilateral neglect associated with right hemisphere lesions and reduce the severity of neglect associated with left hemisphere lesions. To learn if hemispheric asymmetries of neglect are influenced by learned scanning behavior, we used line bisection and cancellation tasks to study patients with unilateral stroke who read only a Semitic or European language before the age of fifteen. We found that independent of reading direction, unilateral neglect was more commonly associated with right than left hemisphere lesions. After right hemisphere damage right to left readers bisected lines closer to center than left to right readers, but on the cancellation test readers of European languages did not perform differently than readers of Semitic languages. These findings suggest that whereas learned scan direction may influence the severity of neglect when measured by line bisection, these learned directional scans cannot fully account for the observed hemisphere asymmetries of neglect. They also suggest that the line bisection test is more influenced by the direction of scanning than is the cancellation test.

Aged↗