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PubMed1984

Effects of predictors of hemispheric specialization on individual differences in hemispheric activation.

In two studies predictors of variation in hemispheric specialization--handedness, sex, familial history of sinistrality, writing posture and sighting dominance--were found not to be independent of individual differences in characteristic activation asymmetry. Predominant direction of conjugate lateral eye movements was used to assess activation asymmetry. The lack of independence between these two dimensions of individual difference, predictors of variation in hemispheric specialization and in activation asymmetry, suggests caution in interpreting the results of studies in which one dimension is examined and the other is uncontrolled.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

Writing postures in left-handers: inverters are hand-crossers.

A behavioural approach shows that the inverted hand-writing posture typical of many left-handers is one element of a well-patterned bimanual strategy including (i) counterclockwise rotation of the page; (ii) horizontal orientation of the active forearm on the page; and (iii) positioning of the non-writing hand just below the beginning of the line of writing. The strategy as a whole is liable to represent an adaptation to the necessity of writing with an adduction movement, rather than the symptom of any neurological particularity.

Functional Laterality↗
PubMed1985

Visual and phonological factors in acquired dysgraphia.

The written spelling behaviour of a severely aphasic patient, whose many errors suggested a strong influence of visuo-spatial representations, is described. An experiment was carried out to confirm or refute the importance of visual factors in spelling to dictation. The strongest confirmatory evidence was the patient's propensity for writing the individual letters of a word in nonlinear order, i.e. not left to right, sometimes even beginning in the middle of a word. The influence of whole visual word-contours was also examined. Analysis of the results suggested that, in addition to the visual element, certain phonological factors played a small part in the patient's repertoire of strategies and this was confirmed in a second experiment. The patient's multi-strategy approach to written spelling is discussed on the basis of an information-flow model. This leads on to consideration of the possibility of consolidating the residual phonological system as part of a re-education plan.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Incidence of left-handed writers and the inverted writing position in a sample of 2194 German elementary school children.

In a sample of 2194 German elementary school children, 6.9% of the females and 9.5% of the males wrote with the left hand. The proportion of left-handers writing with the inverted writing position was much higher than in comparable Canadian samples, particularly in the early grades. The higher incidence in early grades was related to the earlier introduction of cursive style writing in the German sample. There was a significant effect of writing position on the directional consistency of the letter shafts in the writing samples: noninverted writers were more inconsistent in their letter shaft orientation within and between words than inverted writers. The results stress adaptation to the technical demands of left-handed writing in the genesis of the inverted writing position, in support of recent studies (Guiard and Millerat, Neuropsychologia 22, 535-538, 1984) that come to similar conclusions.

Child↗
PubMed1986

Bimanual hand writing in right-handed and left-handed stutterers and nonstutterers.

Right-handed stutterers performed more poorly with their nondominant hand when writing digits and letters bimanually, and also made more nondominant hand mirror reversals than did nonstutterers. Left-handed stutterers and nonstutterers differed only in the incidence of mirror reversals with the nondominant hand. The results support the hypothesis that disorganization in the integration of left- and right-hemisphere inhibitory and excitatory processes may be an integral component of stuttering.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1987

Jargonagraphia: clinical and neuropsychological correlates.

Jargonagraphia (i.e., fluent, unintelligible writing with abundant paragraphias and preserved mechanics of writing) is considered to be an infrequent symptom of Wernicke's aphasia. Six cases fulfilling the definition of jargonagraphia were found in a retrospective series of 1076 consecutive aphasics and the neuropyschological and clinical correlates of this phenomenon were analysed. Jargonagraphia was not qualitatively uniform, and its appearance seems to be conditioned by the interaction of an increased "impulse to write" with disrupted language mechanisms.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Self-assessed and examiner-assessed writing hand posture in Swedish left-handers.

Writing hand posture was studied in 48 male and 54 female left-handed Swedish college students. Inverted posture was more common with examiner-assessment than with self-assessment and was more common in males. Examiner-assessed inversion frequency was lower than that reported from American samples but higher than that from Australian samples. Writing style was related to hand posture, printing being more common in non-inverted writers. Degree of lateral preference, presence of familial sinistrality and birth complications were not associated with writing hand posture.

Achievement↗
PubMed1990

Spectral analysis of the EEG (alpha rhythm) and activity in the left hemisphere: the effects of lateral gaze.

This study tests the effect of maintaining right and left lateral gaze during a writing task which preferentially implicates the left hemisphere using an asymmetry parameter calculated from the spectral power of the alpha rhythm (RP-LP/RP + LP) in a right-handed patient undergoing the same experimental regimen nine times. A six derivation EEG was recorded. Maintaining left lateral gaze (toward the active hemisphere) removes the lateralization found during writing while staring straight ahead whereas maintaining right lateral gaze (toward the side opposite the active hemisphere) results in slightly lower values which are however, not significantly different from those obtained during staring straight ahead. This study adds an electrophysiologic aspect to Kinsbournes's paradigm on gaze position and hemispheric activation.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Right-sided anarchic (alien) hand: a longitudinal study.

A patient with a bilateral frontal vascular lesion, encroaching upon the mesial cortex on the left and damage of the corpus callosum showed the 'alien hand' phenomenon on the right. The various hypotheses as to the nature of the lesion for the alien hand phenomenon to appear are discussed. It is proposed that an acute clinical condition, following a lesion of the corpus callosum only, should be differentiated from a chronic condition resulting from the additional fronto-mesial lesion.

Arm↗
PubMed1993

Characteristics and evolution of writing impairment in Alzheimer's disease.

Rapcsak et al. (Archs Neurol. 46, 65-67, 1989) proposed a hypothesis describing the evolution of agraphic impairments in dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT): lexico-semantic disturbances at the beginning of the disease, impairments becoming more and more phonological as the dementia becomes more severe. Our study was conducted in an attempt to prove this hypothesis on the basis of an analysis of the changes observed in the agraphia impairment of patients with DAT. A writing test from dictation was proposed to 22 patients twice, with an interval of 9-12 months between the tests. The results show that within 1 year there was little change in the errors made by the patients in the writing test. The changes observed however were all found to develop within the same logical progression (as demonstrated by Correspondence Analysis). These findings made it possible to develop a general hypothesis indicating that the agraphic impairment evolves through three phases in patients with DAT. The first one is a phase of mild impairment (with a few possible phonologically plausible errors). In the second phase non-phonological spelling errors predominate, phonologically plausible errors are fewer and the errors mostly involve irregular words and non-words. The last phase involves more extreme disorders that affect all types of words. We observe many alterations due to impaired graphic motor capacity. This work would tend to confirm the hypothesis proposed by Rapcsak et al. concerning the development of agraphia, and would emphasize the importance of peripheral impairments, especially grapho-motor impairments which come in addition to the lexical and phonological impairments.

Agraphia↗
PubMed1995

Impaired movement sequencing in patients with Huntington's disease: a kinematic analysis.

This experiment asked whether Huntington's disease, like Parkinson's disease, another disorder of the basal ganglia, causes a specific progressive deficit in the performance of sequential movement. Ten patients with Huntington's disease and their age-matched controls wrote the lower-case letter "l" four times in a linked cursive script, upon a graphics tablet which sampled pen position at 200 Hz. Kinematic features of sequential movement (stroke length, stroke duration, peak velocity, time to peak velocity and time from peak to zero velocity) were examined in a Group by Stroke Position (2 x 8) design, to identify which aspects of movement might show progressive disturbances. Unlike Agostino et al. [Brain 115, 1481-1495, 1992], this experiment did in fact find progressive changes in the performance of sequential movements. Kinematic analysis indicated a progressive increase in movement duration during sequential movement, that was associated with the accelerative phase of movement.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Lateralized dual task interference in left-handers: initial value differences do not affect the outcome.

The study was conducted to clarify factors involved in dual-task finger-tapping interference. Left-handers, as assessed by hand-writing preference and left-hand baseline tapping advantage, tapped both alone and while solving anagrams. Even though the left-hand baseline tapping advantage was experimentally removed on some (adjusted) trials, greater left- than right-hand tapping interference was observed during concurrent task performance. This result coupled with previous findings for right-handed subjects [Kee and Cherry, Neuropsychologia, Vol. 28, pp. 313-316, 1990] indicates that lateralized interference effects are not merely due to initial baseline tapping differences as proposed by Willis and Goodwin [Neuropsychologia, Vol. 25, pp. 719-724, 1987].

Brain↗
PubMed1996

Does recognizing orally spelled words depend on reading? An investigation into a case of better written than oral spelling.

In this study we describe an investigation into the residual spelling skills of a patient (BRK) with a deep dysgraphia. His written spelling was significantly superior to his oral spelling and he had grave difficulties in recognizing orally spelled words. In addition, his impairment in recognizing orally spelled words was qualitatively very similar to his difficulties in oral spelling. In contrast, he could read and repeat the stimuli he could no longer spell. It seems therefore that, recognizing orally spelled words is dependent on the same procedures used in spelling rather than in reading. It is argued that BRK's discrepancy between oral and written spelling reflects a deficit in accessing a letter name code which translates abstract graphemic representations into letter names. In addition, it is suggested that the letter name code has an additional synthesizing function that is involved both in checking self-generated oral spellings and in recognizing orally spelled words.

Aphasia, Wernicke↗
PubMed1989

A cause and cure of some cases of "writer's cramp".

Writer's cramp is a very disabling condition characterized by difficulty in fine movements of the hand such as writing, shaving, or performing surgery. It is associated with pain in the forearm and upper arm. Women with writer's cramp experience comparable difficulty. An analysis of 100 cases of ruptured C6 disk, proved at operation and taken at random from the files of Semmes-Murphey Clinic, was carried out, and showed that 60 of these had pain in the right arm and 40 had pain in the left arm. Twenty of those with right arm pain had writer's cramp. There was one questionable case of writer's cramp in the left arm. Of the 20 who had writer's cramp, 13 had complete relief of writer's cramp and pain, 1 had no relief (Dr. Butts), and there were 6 lost to follow-up. At least one cause of writer's cramp is suggested, but no claim is made that this is the only cause.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Left alien hand sign and mirror writing after left anterior cerebral artery infarction.

A 43-year-old, right-handed man was admitted complaining of peculiar movements of his left hand. Computed tomography scan and magnetic resonance imaging showed an infarct area in the territory of the left anterior cerebral artery. The abnormal movements of the left hand were diagnosed as so-called alien hand sign. This patient also exhibited mirror writing with his left hand. The clinical manifestations and neuroradiological findings of this case are described in detail, and the possible mechanisms of these extremely rare combinations of alien hand sign and mirror writing are discussed.

Adult↗