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C Luzzatti

Publications and source records attributed to C Luzzatti.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud, Claude-François Lallemand, and the role of the frontal lobe: location and mislocation of language in the early 19th century.

In 1825, Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud read a paper at the Royal Academy of Medicine in Paris supporting Franz Gall's theory of a relation between speech and the frontal lobes. Bouillaud argued that if the frontal lobes are crucial to speech, 2 conditions must be satisfied: when the frontal lobes are affected, speech must also be affected; conversely, when the frontal lobes are spared, speech is also spared. Following these principles, he tested and argued in support of Gall's theory by analyzing the data from 2 neuropathological casebooks (Lallemand, 1820-1823; Rostan, 1820 and 1823). We now know that Bouillaud was wrong, since the crucial dichotomy is between the left and right hemispheres and not between the anterior and posterior areas. What is interesting is that the actual data refute Bouillaud's conclusion. We replicated his experiment by reanalyzing the 147 clinical cases described by Lallemand. There were, of course, some cases with frontal lesions and speech disorders; other cases, however, had speech disorders with lesions outside the frontal lobes, and still others had frontal lesions without speech disorders. Although Bouillaud did not notice it, as we expected, almost all patients with speech disorders had a left hemisphere lesion.

Academies and Institutes↗
PubMed2001

Lexical representation and processing of morphologically complex words: evidence from the reading performance of an Italian agrammatic patient.

The study of patients with acquired language disorders has provided crucial evidence for contemporary theories on mental lexical representation. This is particularly true for the representation of morphologically complex words. In this paper we analyzed the performance of a patient (M.B.) affected by agrammatism and dyslexia. M.B. was required to read aloud simple and morphologically complex words. The patient's pattern of errors was interpreted as the result of a predominant use of the lexical routine (phonological dyslexia). Three reading tasks were developed which allowed us to test M.B.'s ability to read morphologically complex words (reading of regular and irregular plurals; reading of high- and low-frequency singular and plural nouns; reading of evaluative suffixes). Errors were determined by frequency effect rather than by type of suffix (i.e., inflectional or derivational). High-frequency morphologically complex items seemed to meet stored representations, thus avoiding the parsing procedures that are required for less frequent items. These results are in keeping with dual route models of lexical representation of morphologically complex words.

Adult↗
PubMed1999

A perplexing document in the early history of Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome: Melotti's rendition of a "Lecture of Charcot" (including a complete translation from the Italian with commentary).

In 1885, Dr. Guilio Melotti published an Italian translation of a lecture on "Convulsive Tics with Coprolalia and Echolalia" given by Jean-Martin Charcot. Although this lecture often has been cited as an authoritative statement of Charcot's view, until now it has not been translated into English. The lecture presents a number of statements that appear nowhere else in Charcot's published corpus, including some that seem to contradict Charcot's other pronouncements on maladie des tics. Although the Melotti-Charcot lecture may portray Charcot's position accurately in many passages, the article most likely is a compilation from a variety of sources.

France↗
PubMed1998

A neurological dissociation between preserved visual and impaired spatial processing in mental imagery.

Studies on primates have shown that visual and spatial perceptual analysis depends on two separate neural pathways, associated with the processing of "what" and "where" an object is (visual characteristics and spatial coordinates, respectively). Similar dichotomies have been proposed by cognitive psychologists (e.g., the contrast between visual and spatial processing in working memory) and by neuropsychologists (e.g., the distinction between topographic agnosia and amnesia). In this paper we report the case of a patient with a severe spatial disorientation whose perceptual processing of visual and spatial information was normal, but in imagery tasks she had a dissociation between preserved visual and impaired spatial processing. While her ability to represent objects visually was intact, she failed in any task requiring mental rotation, recall of spatial position or execution of spatially based imagery operations. The case clearly demonstrates that visual and spatial imagery are functionally independent processes which must rely on different underlying neural systems. This pattern of impairment also explains the associated topographical amnesia as an inability to integrate spatial information in a mental map.

Aged↗
PubMed1998

Writing disorders in Italian aphasic patients. A multiple single-case study of dysgraphia in a language with shallow orthography.

We report results of a writing task given to 53 mildly to moderately aphasic Italian subjects. The task was designed to test the writing performance along the subword-level routine for the spelling of regular words and non-words, and along the lexical routine for the spelling of irregular words. The aim of the study was to identify the incidence of different dysgraphic subtypes in Italian, a language that is considered to have shallow orthography. Its spelling, however, is not completely free of ambiguity. A five-part writing task was used: (i) words with regular one-sound-to-one-grapheme conversion; (ii) words with regular syllabic conversion; (iii) words with ambiguous transcription; (iv) loan-words; and (v) non-words. For regular words, the effects of word length and word frequency, and of the variables determining the complexity of the acoustic-to-phonological conversion (continuant versus plosive phones; consonant-vowel sequence versus doubled consonants or consonant clusters) were also considered. Patients' performances were classified according to the presence of a dissociation between (i) regular words and non-words, (ii) regular words and words with unpredictable spellings, and (iii) one-to-one and syllabic conversions. The 53 aphasic patients span the whole spectrum of dysgraphic taxonomy. Thirty-nine patients, in particular, manifested a dissociated pattern of performance. Eighteen patients showed a prevalent surface dysgraphic pattern and seven a phonological one, while 11 patients showed a mixed pattern (i.e. a better performance for regular words than for ambiguous words or regular non-words). Three patients showed a specific deficit for regular syllabic conversion rules only. A high rate of 'mixed dysgraphia' suggests either a mutual interaction of the two impaired routines when regular words are written, or two separate functional lesions: one at the level of the auditory-to-phonological conversion procedure, the other at the level of the orthographic output lexicon.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Morphological processing in Italian agrammatic speakers: eight experiments in lexical morphology.

Agrammatic speech production has often been characterized as amorphology. This study of two Italian agrammatic patients shows that, with respect to inflectional morphology of simple and derived nouns, the morphological features of gender and number are almost fully preserved for one patient (MG) and only mildly disturbed in the other patient (DR). Like inflection, the use of derivational suffixation as a means of word-building is only mildly disturbed in both patients. However, they show a severe disturbance with respect to inflectional morphology of lexical compounds, which requires syntactic analysis at the word level. Moreover, they are severely impaired in the choice of the function word for the construction of prepositional compounds, syntactically generated phrases which have the status of a word. Apart from such syntax-dependent morphological and word-building operations, neither inflectional nor derivational morphology are seriously disturbed in our patients. The apparent amorphology in their spontaneous speech can thus not be explained by a disorder of morphological representations in the lexicon system perse. In another study (De Bleser and Luzzatti, 1994) we were able to show that the patients had severe problems with the implementation of morphology in specific syntactic contexts, thus pointing to a problem in morphosyntactic rather than morpholexical processing as a factor contributing to agrammatic speech production.

Adult↗
PubMed1994

Morphological processing in Italian agrammatic speakers syntactic implementation of inflectional morphology.

Most current linguistic and psycholinguistic characterizations of agrammatic production start from the observation that in spontaneous speech inflectional suffixes are either dropped or substituted by default forms, depending on the morphological structure of the language. So far, little experimental evidence has entered theory construction. In this paper, elicited data of two Italian patients with agrammatic speech are presented. The tasks involved the production of a past participle suffix in different sentence contexts. In Italian, the past participle has to agree in gender and number with the grammatical features of an antecedent noun, pronoun, or empty element. It is shown that both patients mastered the general principles of the agreement rule, and that they could produce correct inflectional suffixes in several tasks. Furthermore, the point of breakdown in their performance was syntactic rather than morphological, namely, when there were no overt morphological cues for the identification of the thematic roles in the sentence. These data cannot be accounted for by theories formulated in terms of the syntactic or postsyntactic deletion of suffixes or the functional elements underlying their realization. At least for the patients in this study, morphological substitutions arose as a result of an impairment in the syntactic processing of content words rather than functors.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

Impaired retrieval of object-colour knowledge with preserved colour naming.

Two cases (G.G. and A.V.) are described of cognitive impairment resulting from herpes simplex infection. Both cases demonstrated anomic disorders and impairments in drawing but only in G.G.'s drawings was there a reliable selective impairment for items from natural categories. Both cases, however, showed an impairment for the retrieval of knowledge concerning the colours of objects. The impairment has, in the past, been ascribed to interference from colour anomia; this was not so for the present cases. For G.G. and A.V., impairments in object-colour retrieval were related to errors in picture naming. More errors were associated with items that induced circumlocutions than to those that were correctly named. The impairment was also present for some items that were named correctly. The patients' impairments are discussed within a model in which object-colour knowledge is functionally situated between an object's shape description and its output phonology but on a separate route from other associated object knowledge.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

[Physiology, psychology and pathology of writing and spelling--an overview].

Writing and spelling are conceived as concerted actions comprising cognitive planning, motor action and an expressive content. In literate societies the individual use of alphabetic systems is acquired immediately after speech as a "cultural technique". As such these systems demand specific cognitive and motor skills which have been analysed primarily on the basis of neurological and psychiatric syndromes. We distinguish primary developmental disturbances and secondarily acquired disturbances of writing and spelling, categorizing the latter into four essential disturbance areas: linguistic command, motor execution, automatism control and dynamic tonus regulation. The clinical significance of writing and spelling is not confined to its possible disturbances. In pathologically induced restrictions of cognitive functions or of social skills the fact is rather that the written language frequently contributes to the development of individual coping strategies. From the psychodynamic aspect, written communication is characterized principally by its proximity-regulating function.

Handwriting↗
PubMed1993

Relevance of adverb distribution for the analysis of sentence representation in agrammatic patients.

In this study, it is shown that functional categories are present in agrammatic grammar. Specifically, the verb-adverb order is investigated in three agrammatic patients by means of a constituent ordering task. It is shown that when the verb is in a nonfinite form, it either precedes or follows the specifier-like adverb (both positions are correct), but when the verb is finite, the adverb always follows it (which is the only possible order). The conclusions are that (i) a functional category (namely Inflection), which is responsible for the relative order verb-adverb (of the relevant class), must exist in agrammatic grammar, and (ii) agrammatic aphasia cannot be described as a syntactic impairment involving basic sentence structure.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

An early description of slowly progressive aphasia.

Slowly progressive aphasia without generalized dementia has become an important issue of present-day neuropsychological research. Historically, credit for the first description is usually given to Pick. Another German-speaking author who has published a vivid description of a pertinent cases is Pick's contemporary, Max Rosenfeld. This author has also observed a patient with slowly progressive spatial disorientation and visual recognition deficit, and he has discussed these patients in a remarkably modern way in the context of partial atrophy of the brain.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1991

Generative associative naming in dementia of Alzheimer's type.

Forty-eight patients with mild to moderate dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT) were tested with a generative associative naming task, a task that combines the aspects of fluency and of word association tests. The variables taken into consideration were the number of adequate and inadequate responses, conventionality, word frequency and lexical-semantic relation to the target. DAT patients' performances were compared to those of a group of control subjects matched for sex, age and educational level. As a group, the patients gave fewer adequate responses, more idiosyncratic responses and perseverations, while there was no difference in the qualitative variables. However, the analyses of the performance profiles suggest that, irrespective of the severity of the disease, two major subgroups of DAT patients may be identified: (1) a first subgroup of subjects produced words with a lower conventionality rate and these were mostly in propositional relationship to the target; they also produced a higher rate of idiosyncratic responses and perseverations. (2) A second subgroup of subjects gave more conventional responses, mostly in the hierarchical-categorical relationship. The disorders of the former subgroup seem to correspond to a disrupted access to some relatively spared semantic abilities, whereas those of the latter to a semantic breakdown.

Aged↗
PubMed1988

Slowly progressive aphasia in three patients. The problem of accompanying neuropsychological deficit.

Three patients are described presenting with a slowly progressive aphasic disorder associated with degenerative cortical disease. The symptoms began in the presenium and the length of illness was 4 to 5 years. The language disorder corresponded in all patients to a severe form of amnesic aphasia but a moderate to marked semantic breakdown was also found. Formal language examination was complemented by extensive neuropsychological testing. This revealed a severe deficit in language-dependent cognitive tasks. The patients were given a follow-up language and neuropsychological examination. In addition to the deterioration of language functions, a significant decline was observed in nonverbal intelligence tasks even though their level of performance still remained within the normal range. Follow-up with standardized intelligence tests might detect a trend towards generalized dementia in similar cases. This would mean that these patients should be considered as presenting with slowly progressive aphasia preceding generalized dementia.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1985

Different basic components in the performance of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics on the Colour-Figure Matching Test.

It is known that focal damage of the left hemisphere causes poor performances in a number of tasks devoid of overt verbal connotation, often referred to as "non-verbal intelligence", "association" or "abstract attitude" tasks. However, it is not clear whether the existence of a unitary basic functional defect to account for the faulty performances outlined above can be supposed. In this investigation we have compared the behaviour of left-hemisphere damaged patients grouped according to aphasia type and have studied the extent to which two different, widely used tests of this supposed "non-verbal basic ability" (i.e. the Weigl Sorting Test and the Raven Progressive Matrices) overlap in their predictive power of the performance of a non-verbal association task, i.e. the Colour-Figure Matching Test. Notwithstanding the identical level of performance in the three tests between groups having different aphasia types, a clear-cut dissociation was found between Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics; in the former group the Colour-Figure Matching Test was highly correlated only with Weigl Sorting Test and in the latter only with Progressive Matrices. The conclusions are that in this case the breakdown of non-verbal basic resources does not coincide in patients with different types of aphasia, and the hypothesis of the existence of a unitary basic defect caused by left hemisphere damage is not in line with our findings.

Aphasia↗