英文摘要 |
The dissociations between speech, reading and writing have been proposed, and recent studies also showed the differences between the neural mechanisms of reading and gesturing. The purpose of this study was to justify whether the mechanism of gesturing numbers is dissociated from that of recognizing, reading or writing numbers by conducting experiments on an aphasic patient who suffered from left frontal arterio-venous malformation and received embolization treatment. However, bleeding and IVH came after the embolization treatment. Therefore, the craniotomy was done again and the left F-T-P-O decompressive craniotomy and dural augmentation were performed due to brain swelling. Although the brain damage is severe, this did not bother him to meet the cognitive and motor demands on all the tasks in this present study. A single subject alternating treatments design was employed to compare the differences of number performance among reading, writing and gesturing. Totally, the participant conducted 12 runs of these three tasks in counterbalanced and randomized order to avoid practice effects and serial position effects. The results presented that the participant could recognize and read almost every number correctly and quickly. While writing and gesturing numbers, the accuracy became lower, and the reaction times were taken longer. Besides, his performance in twelve trials of gesturing numbers was inconsistent. The findings of this study implied that the participant’s abilities of number reading and gesture comprehension are almost intact but the ability of number gesturing seems severely impaired. Therefore the dissociation of gesturing numbers from reading and writing numbers can be inferred. |