Variability of the Clinical Picture of Broca's Agraphia during Implementation of Different Cultural Functions of Writing

Abstract

The research is devoted to the study of writing errors in patients with Broca’s aphasia performing the human-specific writing tasks. The object of the study is writing, the subject – disorder of writing in Broca’s agraphia. The aim of the research was to identify the most specific types of errors in writing language, depending on the cultural and historical significance of the actualized functions of writing language in Broca’s aphasia. Used instruments include classical neuropsychological assessment as well as specially developed experimental tasks aimed at actualization of cultural-historical functions of writing (communicative, mnestic and regulatory functions). Nonparametric Chi-square Friedman and Wilcoxon T-criteria used for pairwise comparison of data and analtysis of the distribution of errors. The study involved 22 patients with organic brain damage due to ischemic stroke in the basin of the left middle cerebral artery. Shown that the most specific grammatical errors were syntactic errors such as breaking of the sentence boundaries, omissions of independent and functional words, disorders of concordance and execution. Diversity in the performance of writing tasks that are similar in neuropsychological component structure but differ in functional purposes are explained by the choice of different strategies of writing. However, the general pattern is the dominance of the semantic content of the text over its formal structuring, expressed in grammatical rules. The research confirms that when studying agraphia, it is important to consider both structural (speech act operations) and functional (cultural and historical specific) aspects of writing.