Crossed Wernicke’s aphasia: A case report

Abstract

Crossed aphasia is a phenomenon in which an individual sustains a lesion in the right hemisphere (typically non-language dominant), but who exhibits an aphasic syndrome. The authors present a case study of an individual with crossed aphasia (CA) in an attempt to provide anecdotal information for four questions posed by Pita, Karavelis, and Foroglou (1997): (a) Is CA a reversal of the normal cerebral hemisphere pattern of language function? (b) Does the presence of aphasia following a right cerebral hemisphere lesion indicate that typical right hemisphere functions (e.g., visual perception) are intact? (c) How may the aphasia’s presentation differ from typical left hemisphere aphasias? And (d) is the pattern of improvement following CA similar to that of typical left hemisphere aphasias? We longitudinally examined the communicative-cognitive performance of an adult man with crossed aphasia of the Wernicke’s type following a cerebrovascular accident. A 21-week follow-up evaluation indicated improvements in his language functioning from our initial evaluation, but he continued to exhibit a classic, moderately severe Wernicke’s aphasia.