Marjorie Lorch

The expression and perception of facial emotion in brain-damaged patients

This study examined the expression and perception of facial emotion in patients with unilateral cerebrovascular pathology. Subjects were 12 right brain-damaged (RBD), 15 left brain-damaged (LBD) aphasic, and 16 normal control (NC) right-handed males. Expressions were elicited during posed and spontaneous conditions. Both positive and negative emotions were studied. RBDs were significantly impaired, relative to LBDs and NCs, in expressing and perceiving facial emotion. There were no group differences as a function of condition, but there were differences as a function of emotional valence. Qualitative performance differences also were observed. There was no evidence that the ability to produce a particular emotion was related to the ability to identify the same emotion. Overall, these findings support the notion that the right cerebral hemisphere is dominant for expressing and perceiving facial emotion.

Emotional and non-emotional facial behaviour in patients with unilateral brain damage.

Aspects of emotional facial expression (responsivity, appropriateness, intensity) were examined in brain-damaged adults with right or left hemisphere cerebrovascular lesions and in normal controls. Subjects were videotaped during experimental procedures designed to elicit emotional facial expression and non-emotional facial movement (paralysis, mobility, praxis). On tasks of emotional facial expression, patients with right hemisphere pathology were less responsive and less appropriate than patients with left hemisphere pathology or normal controls. These results corroborate other research findings that the right cerebral hemisphere is dominant for the expression of facial emotion. Both brain-damaged groups had substantial facial paralysis and impairment in muscular mobility on the hemiface contralateral to site of lesion, and the left brain-damaged group had bucco-facial apraxia. Performance measures of emotional expression and non-emotional movement were uncorrelated, suggesting a dissociation between these two systems of facial behaviour.

The merest Logomachy: The 1868 Norwich discussion of aphasia by Hughlings Jackson and Broca

This article reconsiders the events that took place at the 1868 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) in Norwich. Paul Broca and John Hughlings Jackson were invited to speak on the new and controversial subject of aphasia. Over the ensuing decades, there have been repeated references made to a debate between Broca and Jackson. This meeting has been identified as a turning point in favour of Brocas position on the cerebral localization of language. A return to original sources from key witnesses reveals that the opinion of the British practitioners was generally against Brocas views. Close examination of contemporaneous materials suggests that no public debate between Jackson and Broca occurred. However, the public discussion after Brocas presentation records notable concerns over both theoretical issues of localization of function and the status of exceptional clinical cases. A significant stage in the development of current views on the organization of language in the brain is revealed in the accounts of the BA meeting in August 1868 and successive responses to these events in the British press over a period of years.

Hyperlexia in a 4-year-old boy with Autistic Spectrum Disorder

Abstract This paper presents a case study of a 4-year-old boy with Autistic Spectrum Disorder and a mental age of approximately 1:5 who demonstrates precocious oral-reading behaviour in the absence of spontaneous speech. Tests of reading regular and irregular words, pseudowords, homographic heterophones, single sentences and texts were carried out. Performance on a variety of reading tasks suggests the ability to use grapheme–phoneme correspondences and whole word reading for decoding single words. In addition, successful reading of some homographic heterophones and semantic paraphrasing of texts suggests a level of lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic development far beyond his mental or chronological age. The realisation of highly developed reading ability is paradoxical in the context of profound impairment in cognitive development and an absence of spoken language.

How People Listen to Languages They Don't Know.

This study investigates how people listen to and recognize unknown foreign languages. We examine the ability of subjects to describe, transcribe and identify six foreign languages which have various significance in the sociolinguistic context of greater London: Farsi, Punjabi, Spanish, Indonesian, Arabic and Urdu. Unknown foreign languages represent linguistic stimuli as sound patterns without meaning. As such, they raise a number of interesting questions: What aspects of a linguistic stimuli can be processed in the absence of meaning? Do lay people have an awareness of their linguistic environment? Does passive experience affect language awareness? Our findings indicate that the judgments made by untrained listeners are actually quite complex. Although subjects lacked the vocabulary necessary to accurately describe phonetic features, they did offer reports of segmental, suprasegmental, and other impressionistic details. A strong recency effect was found. Our listeners appeared to use a variety of strategies in attempting to identify the target languages. Subjects did appear to have a “feel” for the language family or geographical area where the target language was spoken. Presumably this arises because of general exposure to foreign languages in the media, and from personal contacts. We discuss some evidence from research on categorical perception and the psychology of music which offers a possible interpretation of these findings.

Re-examining Paul Broca's initial presentation of M. Leborgne: understanding the impetus for brain and language research.

The 150th anniversary affords an opportunity to revisit the circumstances surrounding Paul Brocas case report celebrated today as the moment of discovery of aphasia. The proceedings from January to June 1861 of the Paris Society of Anthropology are examined to reconstruct the events surrounding the report of M. Leborgne on April 18th. From a close reading of the presentations and discussions which took place during this period it is apparent that Brocas case report was a minor diversion to a debate about cranial measurements and their relation to intelligence in individuals and racial groups. Moreover, it appears that little attention was granted to Brocas first case at the time. While his ideas about localization and specialization developed and change over the next decade, it represented a minor field of interest for him. Nevertheless Brocas work on aphasia inspired research throughout Europe and North America and went on to have a lasting impact on both aphasiology and neuropsychology.

The History of Written Language Disorders: Reexamining Pitres' case (1884) of pure agraphia

The first clinical description of pure agraphia was reported by the French neurologist Pitres in 1884. Pitres used the case study evidence to argue for modality-specific memory representations and the localization of writing. This article reviews Pitress contribution to the study of acquired writing disorders, the components of writing models and the cerebral localization which subserve writing, in light of the views entertained by his contemporaries and current authors. Although numerous cases have been reported throughout this century, the view that writing can be impaired while other language functions and motor activities remain intact is still challenged.

Darwin's “Natural Science of Babies”

In 1877, the newly founded British journal Mind published two papers on child development. The earlier, by Hippolyte Taine, prompted the second article: an account of his own sons development by the naturalist Charles Darwin. In its turn, Darwins paper, “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” influenced others. Diary studies similar to Taines and Darwins appeared in Mind from 1878. In addition, the medical profession started to consider normal child language acquisition as a comparison for the abnormal. Shortly before his death in 1882, Darwin continued with his theme, setting out a series of proposals for a program of research on child development with suggested methodology and interpretations. Darwin, whose interest in infants and the developing mind predated his 1877 paper by at least 40 years, sought to take the subject out of the nursery and into the scientific domain. The empirical study of the young childs developing mental faculties was a source of evidence with important implications for his general evolutionary theory. The social status of children in England was the subject of considerable discussion around the time Darwins 1877 paper appeared. Evolutionary theory was still relatively new and fiercely debated, and an unprecedented level of interest was shown by the popular press in advance of the publication. This article considers the events surrounding the publication of Darwins article in Mind, the notebook of observations on Darwins children (1839–1856) that served as its basis, and the research that followed publication of “Biographical Sketch.” We discuss the impact this article, one of the first infant psychology studies in English, made on the scientific community in Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Effect of emotional context on bucco-facial apraxia

Patients with left- and right-hemisphere cerebrovascular pathology and normal adult controls were videotaped while executing tasks of bucco-facial praxis in emotional and nonemotional conditions. Each practic movement was assessed for accuracy and motor execution. Left-brain-damaged patients were significantly impaired on these tasks relative to right-damaged patients and controls. When emotional context was provided, apractic performance improved significantly.

The Validity of Barlow's 1877 Case of Acquired Childhood Aphasia: Case Notes Versus Published Reports

In 1877, Barlow described a ten-year-old boy with right hemiplegia and aphasia, quick recovery of language function, and subsequent left hemiplegia and aphasia, who was shown to have symmetrical left and right Brocas area lesions at autopsy. The report of this case motivated many writers in the second half of the nineteenth century to develop theories on localization, laterality, equipotentiality and development of specialization, recovery of function, and the role of the right hemisphere (see Finger et al., 2003, for review). This paper presents an analysis of the original archived case notes that have recently come to light. Examination reveals discrepancies in significant details of the history of the case and raises questions about the degree of impairment and recovery throughout his illness as reported in the published article. Consideration of these differences between the presentation of the case in the British Medical Journal publication and the documentation in the original patient records raises issues about the validity of this case as evidence for the many arguments it was to support that have persisted to the present.