Atypical conduction aphasia and the right hemisphere: Cross-hemispheric plasticity of phonology in a developmentally dyslexic and dysgraphic patient with early left frontal damage

Abstract

We report the rare case of a patient, JNR, with history of mixed handedness, developmental dyslexia, dysgraphia, and attentional deficits associated with a Klippel–Trènaunay syndrome and a small subcortical frontal lesion involving the left arcuate fasciculus. In adulthood, he suffered a large right perisylvian stroke and developed atypical conduction aphasia with deficits in input and output phonological processing and poor auditory-verbal short-term memory. Lexical-semantic processing for single words was intact, but he was unable to access meaning in sentence comprehension and repetition. Reading and writing deficits worsened after the stroke and he presented a combination of developmental and acquired dysgraphia and dyslexia with mixed lexical and phonological processing deficits. This case suggest that a small lesion sustained prenatally or early in life could induce a selective rightward shift of phonology sparing the standard left hemisphere lateralisation of lexical-semantic functions.