Download Fulltext
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The Fifth International Luria Memorial Congress «Lurian Approach in International Psychological Science» Volume 2018 Conference Paper History of Studying Semantic Aphasia Mechanisms (Based on Materials from Lurian Archive) Tatiana Akhutina1 and Anastasia Agris2 1Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia 2Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia Abstract The scientific heritage of Alexander Luria is vast and not completely studied. His scientific archive includes a range of documents that academics have never encountered. We analyzed the history of Luria’s research of semantic aphasia, specifically as it is related to the impairment of visuospatial processing. For this purpose, we investigated unpublished archive materials dating back to 1928–1940, Corresponding Author: particularly the monograph ‘Parietal Aphasia’ from 1940. The literature regarding the Anastasia Agris history of the issue and neurophysiological and linguistic interpretations of semantic [email protected] aphasia is discussed in detail by Luria. We also introduce Luria’s diagnostic manual Received: 25 July 2018 for the semantic impairment of language and describe the syndrome structure of Accepted: 9 August 2018 Published: 1 November 2018 semantic aphasia. To conclude, we discuss the specificity of semantic aphasia analysis in the pre-war monograph compared to later studies. Publishing services provided by Knowledge E Keywords: semantic aphasia, visuospatial processing, temporal-parietal-occipital Tatiana Akhutina and association area, A.R. Luria, neuropsychology, neurolinguistics, history of psychology Anastasia Agris. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which 1. Introduction permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are A significant part of Alexander Luria’s scientific archive is stored at the Laboratory credited. of Neuropsychology within the Faculty of Psychology at Lomonosov Moscow State Selection and Peer-review University. Evgeniya Khomskaya, an academic follower of Luria, first kept these mate- under the responsibility of the rials; after her death they were bestowed to the laboratory. The faculty archive con- Fifth International Luria tains more than 10,000 pages of material, dating from the 1920s to the 1970s, thus Memorial Congress Conference Committee. incorporating nearly the entire research activity of the famous scientist. The archive documents allow for a reconstruction of Luria’s investigations in very different fields of study. We are going to focus only on his investigations of semantic aphasia. Semantic aphasia was described in all the classical works by Luria, including ‘Trau- matic Aphasia’ [1], ‘Higher Cortical Functions…’ [2], ‘The Working Brain’ [3], and ‘Basic How to cite this article: Tatiana Akhutina and Anastasia Agris, (2018), “History of Studying Semantic Aphasia Mechanisms (Based on Materials from Lurian Archive)” in The Fifth International Luria Memorial Congress «Lurian Approach in International Psychological Science», KnE Life Sciences, Page 30 pages 30–41. DOI 10.18502/kls.v4i8.3260 The Fifth International Luria Memorial Congress Problems of Neurolinguistics’ [4]. This type of language impairment refers to a deficit of spatial and quasi-spatial analysis and synthesis, and appears in the case of injury to the inferior parietal (parietal-occipital, temporal-parietal-occipital, or TPO) regions of the brain’s left hemisphere. It manifests in poor understanding of reversible logical- grammatical structures. These utterances require an understanding not only of the isolated words included within them, but also the practical visual context in which the utterances emerge. For effective understanding of such structures, one needs to grasp the relationship between the words in such structure, based on spatial representations. Examples of such utterances include the structures ‘the barrel under the box’ or ‘the brother’s father’, which are broadly used by neuropsychologists in diagnostic tests of semantic aphasia. A wide audience became familiarized with this impairment through the book ‘The man with a shattered world: The history of a brain wound’, devoted to the case-study of a patient named Zasetsky who suffered from semantic aphasia [5]. We will hereafter try to trace the history of the study of semantic aphasia, relying on the aforementioned archive materials and comparing them to the classical works of the famous scientist, including the latest ones. Let us turn to the archive materials. They contain a folder named ‘Elementary semic (semantic) operations’, the term coined by Lev Vygotsky, in close cooperation with whom Luria conducted his clinical work [6]. This folder includes 106 pages of protocols from 1928 to 1936 with 15 patients’ diagnostics results. These protocols reflect Luria’s significant interest in the patients’ difficulties in understanding logical-grammatical structures, one of the two main symptoms of semantic aphasia. According to the protocols, patients were presented with grammatical structures of varying complexity: comparative structures (‘Which square is darker/lighter?’), structures with genitive (‘a mother of a daughter’) and instrumental (‘Show the pencil with the key’) cases, as well as structures with spatial meanings (under/above, on the left/on the right; e.g., ‘Put the pencil to the left of the book’). All of these tasks were included in the classical test battery for speech comprehension diagnostics. Along with that, patients underwent a neuropsychological assessment of speech production, thinking, and spatial functions. The latter were assessed through a variety of tests, namely Henry Head’s Hand-Eye- Ear test and tasks on drawing and visuoconstruction. A large body of material concerning speech comprehension research can be found in the other folders, particularly in the huge (more than 500 pages) set of protocols of the neuropsychological assessment of the patient Avt. who suffered from cerebral syphilis. Luria assessed him from 1929 to 1934. Avt. demonstrated inactivity, which increased as time went on, significant impairments of language and thinking, as well DOI 10.18502/kls.v4i8.3260 Page 31 The Fifth International Luria Memorial Congress as poor insight and situational orientation. Luria was especially concerned with Avt.’s understanding of logical-grammatical structures and verbal reasoning. The latter was tested using tasks requiring explanations of syllogisms, looking for mistakes in the patient’s judgements and so on. The same tasks were given repeatedly, with elements of a teaching experiment. What conclusions did Luria draw from the aforementioned work? The monograph ‘Parietal (Semantic) Aphasia’ [7], written in 1940 and stored in the archive, has never been published. This is part of an unfinished three-volume collection of studies. The first volume, ‘Sensory aphasia’,was finished and presented as a text of the successfully defended thesis on neurology. The third volume was devoted to the analysis of motor aphasia. The manuscript of the second volume, being of particular interest to us, is unfinished; it consists of 171 pages, while the typescript includes 219 pages. Let us briefly discuss each chapter of this work. In the first part (pp. 3–77), Luria reviews the history of the issue in detail, including neurologists’ conceptualizations of the semantic aspects of language impairment. The author distinguishes two main approaches in the preceding and contemporary literature, namely associationism (Broca, Brodbent, and Lichtheim) and anti-localizationism (Goldstein and Gelb). Asso- ciationists explained the semantic disturbance of language by disrupted connections between a word and its representation, leading to ‘verbal amnesia’, or ‘the loss of memory representations linked to a word’. Notably, the loss of representations was considered to cause an impairment of thinking but not of language. These authors argued for the presence of a center of representations or concepts (also known as the center of intellectual operations), which was localized in the TPO region. Such mechanistic ideas, in Luria’s opinion, were fairly criticized by anti-localizationist, who significantly enriched the description of the disrupted connections between language and thinking in cases of injuries to the posterior brain regions. Thus, Goldstein and Gelb [8] described a patient with amnestic aphasia who had difficulties in color nomination. It was the change of the ‘categorical attitude’ toward reality that was the underlying mechanism of this impairment, according to their interpretation, rather than a poor retention of concepts in the memory. Instead of human categorical behavior, the patient demonstrated a more primitive, unmediated attitude to reality; his eye caught the differences between colors, but every color was not an instance of the particular category anymore. The capacity to classify colors was lost and replaced with concrete matching of the colors to one another by tint; therefore, the color names became senseless and were lost [7]. However, Luria also highlighted the drawbacks of this research. In his opinion, the analysis of thinking was carried out without respect to DOI 10.18502/kls.v4i8.3260 Page 32 The Fifth International Luria Memorial Congress the social-historical origins of human thinking, and categorical settings were derived ‘directly from the work of the cerebral cortex’ [7, p. 29]. In line with Luria, but in contrast with classics, Goldstein explained the pathology not through the