Agraphia and Anomia in Bilingual Individual with Left Temporal Lobe Lesion – A Case Report

Abstract

The present study reveals the case report of a 39 year old man with intracerebral hemorrhage in the left temporal lobe. He is a bilingual anomic aphasic patient with Malayalam as mother tongue and English as second language. There was a discrepancy in the scores between the tasks of automatic writing vs word retrieval writing in Malayalam and English. Lexical interference (borrowing of entire word from Malayalam) was found while writing English words in the subtest of written word retrieval of function words (grammatical words). Deficits in writing in the two different languages, i.e., English and Malayalam were definitely different. The scores for the subtest of written word retrieval of function words (grammatical words) was better for English language whereas the scores were better in Malayalam for other writing tasks associated with semantics. This difference in scores raises the question whether deficits can differ between syntax and semantics in different languages. Comparison need to be done in future research studies regarding the performance on oral production across languages so that a better understanding will be available whether the difference in the script is accountable to the difference in the scores or the language as such.