Abstract
Acalculia in aphasic patients should be better investigated in order to understand if it is a simple comorbid or if it is influenced by language disorders. This study aimed to compare the performance on EC301 battery calculation tasks between aphasic and normal subjects and sought to verify a possible association between number processing and calculation skills and linguistic changes in aphasic patients, in order to investigate if language disorders interfere with number processing and calculation. Analytical cross-sectional study with a control group, performed of the Department of Speech and Hearing Disorders of a public university, conducted in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. First, to analyze the specific difficulties encountered in numerical processing and calculation tasks among the aphasic group, aphasic and healthy adult’s performance in specific calculation tasks were compared. The calculation tasks, which had been badly performed by aphasic patients, were selected. Aphasic patients were also submitted to the language tasks from Montreal-Toulouse Protocol: oral and written comprehension, repetition, reading aloud, naming and dictation. We observed that aphasic individuals showed changes in numerical processing and calculation tasks that were not observed in the healthy population. The most important finding of this study was that aphasic individuals showed changes in numerical processing and calculation that were positively associated to their linguistic performance. The strong associations between battery EC301 and linguistic tasks suggest that language disorders interfere with number processing and calculation.
Highlights
Neurological and neuropsychological clinical reports frequently mention acalculia, but specific analyses of acalculia are rather limited
Acalculia in aphasic patients should be better investigated in order to understand if it is a simple comorbid or if it is influenced by language disorders
We observed that aphasic individuals showed changes in numerical processing and calculation tasks that were not observed in the healthy population
Summary
Neurological and neuropsychological clinical reports frequently mention acalculia, but specific analyses of acalculia are rather limited. Some studies suggest that numerical and language processings are partially overlapping skills; for some numerical tasks, calculating and linguistic abilities are closely related, and for others, there is no correlation, with some calculation tasks being completed by patients with severe language impairment. These studies were performed involving brain-injured individuals with different types of aphasia, educational levels and professions [3] [5] [6] [8]-[10] and accounted for the variability of each individual and neurological impairment. The authors concluded that the findings suggested associations between impairments in language processing and numerical tasks, one should be cautious in drawing conclusions regarding the verbal basis of general numerical skills [12]
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