It has been suggested that formal thought disorder, the incoherent speech of schizophrenia, may involve a language disturbance among other abnormalities, or even be a form of dysphasia. Six patients with and seven without formal thought disorder were evaluated on an aphasia test battery. Spontaneous speech was also analysed using Brief Syntactic Analysis. Poor performance on the aphasia test battery was found to be associated with general intellectual impairment but not with formal thought disorder. Naming was preserved in both groups. Patients with formal thought disorder, but not those without, produced semantic errors in their spontaneous speech, and these were unrelated to general intellectual status. The disorder of language in formal thought disorder thus appears to be one of expressive semantic abnormality, which, however, spares naming. Further analysis of two intellectually preserved patients suggested that formal thought disorder may be associated with an additional difficulty in constructing an appropriate model for generating one's own speech.
We investigate whether retrograde-amnesia can be indexed with pupil activity. We present the case of L, 19-year-old, without neurological or psychiatric disorders except for retrograde-amnesia. We invited L to retrieve retrograde and anterograde memories while his pupil size was monitering with eye-tracking glasses. Results demonstrated impaired retrograde retrieval but successful anterograde retrieval in L. He also attributed lower emotional value and visual imagery to his retrograde compared to his anterograde memories. Critically, smaller pupils were observed during retrograde than during anterograde retrieval. Our study provides the first evidence on the value of pupillometry as a potential physiological marker of amnesia.
Pure alexia without agraphia is characterized by impaired reading due to damage to the occipitotemporal cortex with preserved writing skills. In this case report, we investigate the effect of multiple oral re-reading (MOR) therapy adjunct with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in improving reading recovery of a 64-year-old patient with pure alexia without agraphia following a stroke. His MRI revealed an area of infarct with microhemorrhages at the left occipitotemporal region. The patient was blinded to each therapy and underwent seven consecutive sessions of sham tDCS followed by seven consecutive sessions of real tDCS, coupled with 1-hour MOR therapy during each session. Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) was performed at baseline, before sham and real-tDCS, and 6 weeks after completing tDCS therapy. The patient showed improvement using both sham and real-tDCS with better reading comprehension, average reading time, and word per minute after real-tDCS. This study suggests that MOR, coupled with tDCS therapy may accelerate the reading recovery in patients with pure alexia.