PMID- 15210886
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20041201
LR  - 20220311
IS  - 1526-632X (Electronic)
IS  - 0028-3878 (Linking)
VI  - 62
IP  - 12
DP  - 2004 Jun 22
TI  - The role of left posterior inferior temporal cortex in spelling.
PG  - 2221-9
AB  - OBJECTIVE: To determine whether damage to left posterior inferior temporal cortex 
      (PITC) is associated with agraphia and to characterize the nature of the spelling 
      impairment. BACKGROUND: Left angular gyrus may play a critical role in spelling. 
      However, this traditional view is challenged by reports of agraphia after left 
      temporo-occipital lesions and by functional imaging studies demonstrating 
      activation of left PITC during writing in normal individuals. METHODS: Patients 
      with focal damage to the left temporo-occipital cortex and normal control 
      subjects were administered a comprehensive spelling battery that included regular 
      words, irregular words, and nonwords as stimuli. RESULTS: Although patients 
      performed worse than control subjects in all experimental conditions, the 
      spelling deficit was particularly severe for irregular words, whereas regular 
      word and nonword spelling were less impaired. Additional analyses indicated that 
      orthographic regularity and word frequency had a much more pronounced effect on 
      spelling accuracy in patients compared with control subjects. Most errors on 
      irregular words were phonologically plausible, consistent with reliance on a 
      sublexical phonologic spelling strategy (i.e., phoneme-grapheme conversion). 
      Overall, the spelling impairment of the patients showed the characteristic 
      profile of lexical agraphia. Lesion analyses indicated that the damage in the 
      majority of patients encompassed an area within the left PITC (BA 37/20) where 
      the authors previously obtained evidence of activation in a functional imaging 
      study of writing in normal participants. CONCLUSIONS: The behavioral and 
      neuroanatomic observations in the patients are consistent with functional imaging 
      studies of writing in neurologically intact individuals and provide converging 
      evidence for the role of left PITC in spelling. Together, these findings 
      implicate left PITC as a possible neural substrate of the putative orthographic 
      lexicon that contains stored memory representations for the written forms of 
      familiar words.
FAU - Rapcsak, Steven Z
AU  - Rapcsak SZ
AD  - Neurology Section, Southern Arizona VA Health Care System, Tucson, AZ 85723, USA. 
      szr@u.arizona.edu
FAU - Beeson, Pelagie M
AU  - Beeson PM
LA  - eng
PT  - Journal Article
PT  - Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
PL  - United States
TA  - Neurology
JT  - Neurology
JID - 0401060
SB  - IM
MH  - Aged
MH  - Aged, 80 and over
MH  - Agraphia/etiology/*pathology
MH  - Dyslexia, Acquired/etiology/*pathology
MH  - Hematoma/complications
MH  - Humans
MH  - Infarction, Posterior Cerebral Artery/complications/pathology
MH  - Language
MH  - Magnetic Resonance Imaging
MH  - Middle Aged
MH  - Temporal Lobe/*pathology
MH  - Writing
EDAT- 2004/06/24 05:00
MHDA- 2004/12/16 09:00
CRDT- 2004/06/24 05:00
PHST- 2004/06/24 05:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2004/12/16 09:00 [medline]
PHST- 2004/06/24 05:00 [entrez]
AID - 10.1212/01.wnl.0000130169.60752.c5 [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO  - Neurology. 2004 Jun 22;62(12):2221-9. doi: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000130169.60752.c5.