A description of verbal and gestural communication during postictal aphasia.

A description of verbal and gestural communication during postictal aphasia. Epilepsy Behav. 2019 Nov 20;102:106646 Authors: Fasola A, Alario FX, Tellier M, Giusiano B, Tassinari CA, Bartolomei F, Trébuchon A Abstract Patients suffering from drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy show substantial language deficits (i.e., anomia) during their seizures and in the postictal period (postictal aphasia). Verbal impairments observed during the postictal period may be studied to help localizing the epileptogenic zone. These explorations have been essentially based on simple tasks focused on speech, thus disregarding the multimodal nature of verbal communication, particularly the fact that, when speakers want to communicate, they often produce gestures of various kinds. Here, we propose an innovative procedure for testing postictal language and communication abilities, including the assessment of co-speech gestures. We provide a preliminary description of the changes induced on communication during postictal aphasia. We studied 21 seizures that induced postictal aphasia from 12 patients with drug-refractory epilepsy, including left temporal and left frontal seizures. The experimental task required patients to memorize a highly detailed picture and, briefly after, to describe what they had seen, thus eliciting a communicative meaningful monologue. This allowed comparing verbal communication in postictal and interictal conditions within the sam...
Source: Epilepsy and Behaviour - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Epilepsy Behav Source Type: research