Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A STUDY ON PURE WORD-DEAFNESS

1940; BMJ; Volume: 3; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1136/jnnp.3.3.251

1468-330X

R. E. Hemphill, E. Stengel,

From the Bristol City and County Mental Hospital ONE of the speech disorders which in the past was studied with great interest is the so-called pure word-deafness.In recent years, however, it appears to have been somewhat neglected, perhaps because the conditibn is rare and does not appear to fit in well with the modern conceptions of aphasia (Jackson, Marie, Head, Goldstein).Pure word-deafness was described and defined for the first time by Lichtheim (1885) as a speech disorder in which the ability to understand spoken language, to repeat spoken words, and to write from dictation were lost, and, at the same time, the ability to speak, write, and read spontaneously was preserved.In the picture of pure word-deafness there were no paraphasias and the inner speech remained undisturbed.A lack of attention to acoustic sensa- tions was regarded as typical.Lichtheim's observations were confirmed by Wernicke (1874), Wyllie (1894), Ballet (1901) et al., Arnaud (1887), who named the disorder " surdite verbale brute," pointed out that it was characterized by an impairment of the gross hearing of words.According to him the actual understanding of the sounds of words was disturbed, a fact confirmed by other observers.In some of the cases described pure word-deafness seemed to develop from a typical auditory aphasia.In these cases the purity of the picture was impaired by the existence of paraphasias and other signs of dis- turbance of the inner language.The question whether defects of hearing as well, caused by disturbance of the inner ear could give rise to the condition was discussed by some authors, who expressed the view that labyrinthine lesions might sometimes cause the symptoms of pure word-deafness.This view, however, was questioned when, in a case where an existing bilateral lesion of the labyrinths had been regarded as the cause of pure word-deafness (Freund, 1903), the post-mortem examination revealed a tumour involving the first temporal convolution of the left hemisphere.As the ordinary technique for the investigation of the hearing capacity cannot be employed in pure word- deafness, the use of the Bezold-Edelmann's continuous series of tuning forks was recommended, and it was pointed out that at least that portion of the tone scale known as speech sext (Bezold, 1903), with a proportion of tones for a considerable distance above and below, must be intact before the diagnosis of pure word-deafness could be justifiably made (Bonvicini, 1905).Although we do not propose to quote in detail the bulk of the literature on this subject, we