Sui rapporti fra alcune prove di intelligenza verbale e lesioni cerebrali monoemisferiche

Two high level verbal tasks (Word Fluency and Phrase Construction) have been administered to 245 patients affected by monohemispheric cerebral lesions and to 55 normal subjects, taken as a control group. Among brain damaged patients, 109 showed right hemispheric lesions, 66 left hemispheric lesions without aphasia and 70 left hemispheric lesions with aphasia. The aim of this study was to decide whether the 'high level' linguistic disturbance sometimes shown by right brain damaged patients must be considered as a specific one or as a non specific trouble due to the mass action of cerebral lesions. The results seem to show that the impairment of the high level linguistic tasks sometimes put in evidence in right brain damaged patients cannot be ascribed to a specific disorder. An interesting dissociation has been found between the performances obtained on the two high level verbal tasks. Word Fluency appears to be very sensitive to the presence of aphasia, while defective performance on Phrase Construction seems mostly due to the mass action of cerebral lesions.